France’s OVHcloud to build frontier AI as a European challenger

TL;DR:

• OVHcloud, Europe’s largest cloud provider, plans to train frontier AI models, positioning itself as a challenger to Mistral.
• CEO Octave Klaba put the cost at £137m–£183m (€150m–€200m), down from roughly £915m (€1bn) a few years ago.
• The firm aims to open-source its models and has finished pre-training one on Europe’s Jupiter supercomputer.

OVHcloud plans to train frontier AI models — the most advanced systems built from scratch using vast data and compute — its chief executive said, positioning Europe’s largest cloud provider as a potential challenger to fellow French firm Mistral. Speaking at the VivaTech conference, CEO Octave Klaba framed the move as a strategic necessity as governments and companies hunt for alternatives to US and Chinese systems.

A ‘second wave’ of models

That search has grown more urgent after the abrupt US-ordered switch-off of Anthropic’s top-tier models. “It became quite clear to us that if we don’t master this technology, we can’t guarantee our future,” Klaba said. He argued the economics have shifted: advances in chips, training techniques and synthetic data mean a project that once cost around £915m (€1bn) could now be attempted for £137m–£183m (€150m–€200m).

Klaba described the industry entering a “second wave” of entrants building on groundwork from OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral, and said OVHcloud would launch a family of models rather than one system, without using client data to train them. Pre-training has been completed on a model using Jupiter, Europe’s fastest supercomputer, via recently acquired startup DragonLLM — with the firm intending to open-source the models once they are strong enough.

Looking forward

For UK readers, OVHcloud’s bid is a direct parallel to Britain’s own sovereign-AI debate and France’s decision to drop Palantir over dependency concerns. It also sharpens a competitive question: as European players move to build frontier capability at a fraction of the old cost, the UK risks being left debating sovereignty while neighbours start constructing it. Whether OVHcloud’s open-source ambition delivers models that genuinely rival US frontier systems is the test still to come.