OVHcloud — Gravelines AI SuperPOP Campus (France)

OVHcloud is Europe's largest cloud infrastructure provider by physical footprint, and Gravelines is its flagship campus — the largest private data center complex in Europe by number of servers, housing hundreds of thousands of machines across multiple buildings on a former steelworks site on the North Sea coast in northern France.

The Gravelines campus spans multiple facilities (GRA1 through GRA11) and exceeds 130 MW of total installed capacity. OVHcloud's decision to build in Gravelines was driven by direct access to the North Sea for water cooling and proximity to the French high-voltage transmission grid, which draws primarily from nuclear generation — one of the lowest-carbon grid mixes in Europe.

**AI GPU infrastructure**: OVHcloud launched its GPU cloud offering in 2023, initially deploying NVIDIA A100 and H100 SXM5 nodes through its Public Cloud platform. GPU instances are available across AI Training and AI Deploy products, targeting European AI developers who need compliant, locally hosted compute. OVHcloud markets these as a GDPR-compliant alternative to US hyperscalers, particularly relevant for regulated sectors including healthcare, finance, and government.

**Scale and investment**: OVHcloud has publicly committed to significant GPU fleet expansion as part of its AI strategy. The company operates a vertically integrated model — designing and manufacturing its own servers in its Croix (near Roubaix) assembly facilities — which allows faster GPU cluster deployment compared to operators relying on third-party hardware supply chains.

**European sovereign AI positioning**: OVHcloud positions itself as the infrastructure backbone for European digital sovereignty. It is a founding member of GAIA-X, the EU-backed cloud initiative. The Gravelines campus hosts a significant fraction of the compute capacity behind OVHcloud's sovereign cloud offering, which meets French government SecNumCloud certification requirements.

The company's AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating in response to French and EU policy incentives for domestic cloud and AI compute, including French government contracts and EU AI Act compliance readiness offerings.