On building a global cloud champion Keynote by Octave Klaba (OVHcloud) – OC3 2026

Hello, I'm really happy to be here to talk about a little bit of the technology. But, let's start with what your question about OVH. So, OVH is the cloud provider. Okay, you know a few of them. They are American guys. There was not so many that European. We are one of them. I think we are the biggest one. With 1.2 billion revenue, with 300 people, 40 data centers, 450,000 physical servers network, 100 terabytes of capacities, etc. A lot of stuff doing internally. So, we have this public cloud with the different 40 plus products with the storages and AI, databases, etc. The goal is really to deliver the fundamentals of the IaaS and PaaS to our customers on the DevOps side, but also for everybody that wants to just become a cloud provider because it's also part of our business. We have bare metal. We have private cloud that allows our customers just to grab the best hardware on the market and they build up themselves the cloud provider. So, this is also what we deliver to the market. We love competition. We love having the different partners, competitors using our infrastructure. And this is also what we deliver: this message about the freedom, freedom of choice. What we call innovation is freedom. This is how we build this company.

It's really interesting topic because it's one of the part of the technology that usually you will put on the table once you go to the cloud providers. So, of course, there was the encryption of the storage address. There's the encryption about all the communications on the network. SSL is just basic things. But you need to put the confidentiality everywhere. And when in this all this flow of the data between the end user and the data center and the servers, in fact, our customers, they ask us more and more guarantees, more technologies that they can control, they can verify, they can recheck that everything is right, is done in the right way. So, confidential computing is coming there for a very specific area where we run when we want to encrypt, let's say, the RAM. Because, of course, you know, I think this is the right audience to tell that you have a lot of zero days. Okay, you have those in the past and in the future you will have a lot of zero days. And also this dumping of the RAM, trying to figure out what is inside, finding the different figures, it's part of the risk that some customers they can put on the table. Confidential computing answers all this some of them, but not all, the challenges about this using of the RAM, the right using of the RAM. But it's also solving the issue about the communication between the different devices on the hardware. As you can see, this communication between the CPU and the GPU. And they're using an encryption of the PCI. It's all this part of the technologies that is involving bringing the AMD, Intel, Samsung, the different Nvidia bring on the tables to make this technologies safer, really safe to usage at scale. And this is also our as a cloud provider our goal to bring all these technologies, but not making it complex to use. Because we know that it is complex. Okay, all this management of the keys, rotation of the keys, managing of the HSM, managing the high availability of the keys in the three different data centers. How you make with the one data center to down and then everything has to work. So, all these technologies they are complex to manage, to put all together, and it's our goal to make it easy. As easy as a call of the API. And this is how we work internally to bring all these technologies and trying to put that in the hands of our customers in the easier way possible.

So, sovereignty is not a new topic for OVH. You know, I've been doing that for 25, 27 years. 27 years, and they already started with this idea about we need that all this computers work in the better way together, but also isolate every country from each other. Even if we have this Europe, we don't have really the same exactly laws. And then understanding and the history, they are not the same every border. And when you go outside of Europe, we went to Canada, went to US, we went to India. We have the data center here in Singapore, also in Australia. It becomes more even more complex to operate all this data centers, hardware, software, because the way that it's understood is different. There was something that is forbidden in France, it's allowed in Spain. Something that is forbidden in Europe can be allowed in Japan. So, all this complexity of how we manage these services for every customer make us allow us to really understand that we cannot operate as a global player. We cannot. We have to be something different. And we defined this differentiation with the word that is multi-local. We have to be not just local, but be able to be multi-local player. That means that we have to be able to respect local laws even if we are in the different countries. So, of course, there was the countries that we know by design that will be complex to respect if we go to Russia, China, some countries like that will be really complex to allow us to say to customers, you can trust us. We will respect all the laws, and it will work perfectly. But we went just to the countries that we are able to deliver this multi-local strategy. And that means that we are globally in every country in Europe. We created 12 different subsidiaries with local team in Europe. We're in Canada, we are in the US, we are as I said in some countries in Asia where we are able to deliver that. What does it mean? We have a legal structure of the company that allows us to operate in every country but being totally isolated from the operational and legal side from each other. It's more complex to operate because we have some teams that they are double. Okay, in US we have totally a new team. We have a community executive locally. We have a board to isolate all this operational still same strategy, still same processes but operationally isolation. That means also when you try to subscribe to OVH you will have choice to the three different back ends login. There's a login for Europe, login for Canada, login in US. It's totally separated, different databases and different locations. So, this is just to give you the examples about what does it mean running the cloud provider in the sovereign way so we can deliver this promise that we put on our website.

Now going back to the confidential computing, we saw that in the last years this technology that is really cool was used by the American companies, American cloud providers saying, 'Hey guys, in fact, you don't really need all these isolations that I've just been talking about. These isolations about legal teams, etc. because you know, you have the technologies that allows you to protect your data.' And of course it works. Okay, from the technology point of view. The question is where are the keys? Where are the keys? Who has the access to the keys? Who can dump the different things? Because end of the day, zero trust infrastructure it's something that everybody is going in this direction, but it's really complex to deliver that at scale in a really good way. So, it's still something that can be done in a different way. And if I give you or you give me the root access on your server and you have your virtualization, will I be able to dump the customer data or not? Give me the root and we'll see. Give me your server that is zero trust and we'll see. So, this is the challenge that we are all going after. We are not there. Okay, we are not there, but confidential computing is the step another step to go over. We still need to work on the technology to add additional things that can maybe at the end of the day having this zero trust architecture from end to end on all pieces of the cake. But today there is still a room, a small room that it's not done.

It's really interesting how Nvidia and the CPU and the way that trying to solve that and I think this is good step that will allow also having these answers part of the answers for some customers that they want to run very sensitive data on their side and they want to use AI to have the answers for the questions or even coding or even using for the agents AI. So, it's a part of the answer and I'm really glad that we are there. We were we just partner with Edgeless to work with some part some box and to implement that in the better way for some specific workloads. But, it's really nice to see that this technology, you know, in Europe we have so many talented people. We should just work more together. And this is also my message about all these technologies. Of course, the American cloud providers they are good. You will never hear me saying blaming them. They are good. But, here in Europe we are good also. We have a lot of talented people. We have a lot of resources. We have also the ideas and we can implement the things that can be used by all the European citizens. And this is also the purpose of OVH. I've been doing that for 27 years. I can sell this company and being happy drinking the pina colada on the beaches. Okay? I'm still here. Okay? I'm still here on stage. I'm still here working. I work every day. I'm not coding anymore, but more vibe coding now as usually you should do today. And this is also the purpose. We need to build that together. We need to build that and work more together to bring that what we don't have this cloud providers, but also providers of the software SaaS that we all need here in Europe.