I'm very happy that we've made progress on the explainability of what we're offering our clients, and we're seeing feedback, especially from large accounts who are now looking for solutions and want to discuss with us. Before, they used to say they didn't have much to buy from us. Now we see them coming to us to solve a number of their problems. But they didn't even look at you. That means before, we used to say we take American. That's it. That's it. But today, the calls for tenders, you take the ECB, you take the European Union, you take a number of banks, you take healthcare. Well, in fact, these are subjects where data criticality, where daily operations are super important. And so now, we see calls for tenders appearing where you have the shutdown risk. Okay. So that's what motivates certain actors today to consult us to say we want to depend on European laws. We don't want laws from outside Europe to intervene in our way of operating our company, quite simply. But it's true that there are even companies that go even further, who go back to on-premise, meaning they say we're going to repatriate our entire infrastructure into our own premises because we want to depend only on ourselves. So that means there's really a trend going in that direction.
Can we break down some preconceived notions? Because until now, what was said is that the hyperscalers, the American providers, are great because it's very practical, it's more technologically performant, it costs less. Is it true that it costs less?
No, they are good technologically, of course. Uh, we, back in the day, when we talked to clients about ten or fifteen years ago, when we talked about developing this type of product, clients told us, 'But it costs way too much.' So we didn't develop those products. We only started in 2021. We raised money, we went public, we invested that money. Now, those products are coming out. They are becoming visible for clients in Paris. It's our first demonstrator in the Paris region with three data centers. Milan is coming, Berlin is coming. And so we are catching up on these delays with the modest 40 products, but 40 products that are the basics of what our clients need.
But you say today, I can offer the same thing at the same price range with the same technology. Cheaper, cheaper.
Uh yes, of course, that's what we offer. But also, you talked about on-premise. We developed a product because we saw the movement coming. On-premise, it's really that, I come back, I repatriate my infrastructure. For 5 years, we saw that it was going to happen, that there was going to be a movement. So we developed a product. These products, well, they're super interesting for hospitals. It's super interesting when you need to modernize a factory and you need modern software. You want to have a warehouse, robots in the warehouse. You want to have artificial intelligence to manage a warehouse. Well, today we have products where we deploy a half-rack with everything inside. The cloud comes to you. Okay? So that's operational sovereignty. Meaning you don't go to a cloud somewhere with us or AWS or Azure, it's at your place. And the client says, I want this but at my place. And so we developed the product for that so that he can continue to do software development but at his place because he needs security, because he needs low latency or the connection isn't stable.
But you say in the calls for tenders, we're being listened to more. We see that we're signing contracts for real. Has the number of clients increased?
So in digital, we already had clients, we continue to sign. In RFPs, so the largest companies, currently, even just last night, I was helping the teams respond to calls for tenders in Quebec regarding certain things. So it's every day. Okay. And it's massive.
There's also a form of distrust at some point regarding OVH compared to hyperscalers in terms of reliability. So there was the fire incident in Strasbourg in 2021 which also had an impact on the company's image. Meaning people were saying, yes but my data, it's a resilience story. So tell us, okay, you've been pushing the company in a certain direction for 25 years.
Okay, we made mistakes, we had certain industrial accidents, and we move forward and we learn from that. And the clients who follow us, who trust us, continue to be there. If they left, they come back. Okay. And behind that, we took Strasbourg, for example, the Paris region, it's three data centers. Okay? And so the services run in all three. If one goes down, it continues to function. So we learn from our mistakes, we move forward and we offer new services to clients based on what they express, what they need.
We have the impression from reading the last Tech for France at Versailles where we receive foreign CEOs that France has become a land of data centers. A good portion of the billions invested are going towards this sector as if it's our geographical position. The question is energy, it makes us a privileged host country for data centers. Do you consider that to be the case?
Well, I consider that to be the case but not just for a year. It's not because of AI that we think it's the case. It's been 25 years. I'm repeating 25 years a bit but I made investments in 2004, in 2011, and in 2016. In 2016, just to remind you, we raised 250 million at the time to create 14 data centers in France. We have today in France 100 MW of electrical power. Okay. In the data centers, we invested 10 years for 10 times less than what actors are doing today.
