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Octave Klaba

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, OVH Groupe

Search every verified Octave Klaba interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Octave Klaba, founder and CEO of OVHcloud, testified before the Economic Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly on September 29, 2026, discussing the company's strategy, data center deployment, and cloud services. During the hearing, he addressed digital sovereignty, service transparency, and the independence of the European digital ecosystem. Klaba described OVHcloud's in-house server manufacturing across two factories, producing approximately 50,000 to 60,000 physical servers annually, and emphasized the company's focus on component circularity and recycling. He also commented on European procurement frameworks, noting that OVHcloud, along with Deep and Clever Cloud, was selected for a contract worth 180 million euros over four to five years, which he described as a positive first step while suggesting the amounts remain insufficient relative to the scale needed. At the Nexus Luxembourg 2026 event on September 15, 2026, Klaba discussed Europe's position in the global AI race, defining sovereign AI as the ability to innovate, deploy, and scale AI while maintaining control over data, infrastructure, and strategic choices. He argued that barriers to building AI have fallen significantly, citing that an investment of one billion dollars four years ago would now be equivalent to roughly 100 to 200 million dollars for similar or greater output. Klaba also explained his return to the CEO role after previously serving as chairman, stating that the AI moment required aligning capital, board, and execution under one leader. He criticized tied licensing practices among hyperscalers, describing them as locking clients into unrelated software products, and highlighted the importance of data quality over data volume in AI development.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I think our civilization is based on cheap energy. Meaning that today, in a society like France or other countries, the cheaper the energy, the more jobs you create because you can foster activities, processing of various elements, automotive, data centers, or other sectors. So, in a way, just like for digital, energy is essential; it is the very foundation of activity. And asking for, in terms of global policy, how ”

“The European Commission says: 'We are going to put up 180 million to test and develop with you, to give you the chance to go after subsequent tenders from different agencies and prove that you are capable of handling all, or at least some, of the activities currently hosted by the hyperscalers.' I think it's super interesting because you have to keep these 180 million in perspective, which will roughly represent abou”

“The most detestable phenomenon is really the tied license. That is to say, an actor with products that have nothing to do with each other blocks or locks clients by saying 'I give you these software, but if you consume the other software' and in this way they distribute drugs and then they take new types of clients and then they lock them. That's detestable. And so it's all about tied sales between products that have”

“The European Commission, they made a framework. They used these frameworks to select European players. We were chosen as one of the winners with Deep and with Clever Cloud on a contract of 180 million over 4-5 years. It's good because it's the first step. I think it's the method that we should retain more than the amounts at stake today. It's true that 180 million over 5 years for 4 players is not yet what needs to b”

“I was a CEO and CTO for 16 years in OVH, build the company up to 400 million, and then we, I stepped down being just chairman but still in charge of the innovation for seven years, and now I came back as the CEO and chairman. So why? Because this AI it's a really historic moment, not just for OVH but for the whole market, and you have to align the capital, you have to align board, and you have to align execution just”

“So this is really specific moment for the European cloud and European AI. You know, we are in this moment that after four years of deploying the AI worldwide, this technology it's easier to understand. You need four things to bring the AI to the consumer, to the customers. You need teams, we have teams in Europe, we have very talented people that can work on all this AI stuff. We need algorithm, it's all about the st”

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