Hello, hello everyone. I'm with Octave Klaba, founding chairman of OVH. Hello. Hello. First European provider of cloud computing services. We're going to talk about the first half results for 2025-2026. Two figures before handing over to Octave. Organic growth +5.5%, 555 million euros, that's for H1. EBITDA margin record, ladies and gentlemen, 40.9%. 40.9%, yes, it's a record since the IPO.
A word perhaps on your figures? Well, actually, we are very happy. We are showing our ability to deliver revenue while controlling costs. So that's very important. It's really an internal rigor of execution, of taking risks, of recruitment, of making sure that all teams are focused on delivery. On the revenue, 5.5% is fine, but I want to come back to the 10% plus. So there's still a little bit of work to do to properly redirect all sales forces towards the objectives so that we can deliver the 10% plus as we always have.
I saw that it was especially the public cloud that progressed by 15%. The public cloud, let's recall, is 21.4% of revenue, it's progressing. It's a bit more mixed in the private cloud, 60% of revenue, which only progresses by 3.4%. Why is there such a difference between public cloud and private cloud?
Actually, there is always a need for infrastructure. Okay? So private cloud is the bare metal infrastructure and VMware from Broadcom. We always need that, but what's happening is a fairly new phenomenon that we've been seeing for 1 or 2 years, which is that during December, January, February, there's the end of the calendar year, and given the successes we've had with large companies in recent years, we're starting to see these cost optimization phenomena during that period of year-end and start of a new fiscal year. And that's what we see specifically in Q2, which was, I was discussing with many salespeople who are in contact with clients. It was a bit difficult, but Q3, Q4 still remain to be delivered. We'll see how it all evolves.
What is the web cloud? I looked at your results. The web cloud is 18% of revenue, it increased by 2.4%. What exactly is the web cloud?
It's an activity we've had since the beginning of OVH, which consists of offering web presence. What does that mean? Websites, domain names, email, the website, hosting, or simply WordPress for example. You need a blog, you need a forum, or a company needs to communicate through emails, with clients, with its employees. So they need this type of service. There's VoIP in there too, connectivity, which are also historical activities. Behind these web clouds, and you'll see, it's going to be interesting in the next quarter, it's going to evolve towards web AI because we see that it's a place where AI helps clients enormously to go faster, personalize, be able to do with less skills for the entire configuration and deployment. And that's where we're working on products that will allow clients to go much faster to create their web presence.
Speaking of AI, I saw you were launching the AI AB to meet the demand for what's called sovereign or verticalized AI. Can you explain this launch and what is sovereign verticalized AI?
So first, we're trying to kill two birds with one stone. What we see currently with AI, of course everyone talks about it, everyone uses it now daily, both B2C, consumers, and in companies. What we see is that there is demand from companies in the sector where we are to offer LLM models, so models that answer questions in a chat, but not only in a chat, where we control the data. That is, we have a guarantee that no one looks at the data because it's sensitive. Sometimes you need to run it on-premise because it's so sensitive that you can't go to the cloud. Well, when you're in this type of activity, you don't have many choices. You have none, actually. And so what we're trying to do through Dragon is to be able to go after a vertical with a client, to help them isolate their data, train and fine-tune their models so they can have, on-premise or with us, but for them only, LLMs that answer very precisely and very well to their own business questions.
That's thanks to the acquisition of Dragon LM. That's right. Everything is linked. That's right.
We're making acquisitions this year. You saw we did one at the beginning of the year, and Dragon. Dragon too, which is a great one. There will be others throughout the year to strengthen a certain number of product aspects, functionalities that we didn't have. Typically, we had a model internally, I have teams that know how to do it, but doing it from scratch, meaning building a fundamental model behind it and fine-tuning it in a vertical to the point where clients, they managed both. For example, the vertical they addressed was finance. So they sold fine-tuned models in finance. First, proof that clients are ready to buy quality. That's what we needed to be able to go further with them and therefore be able to do new things behind it. Certainly, I'll come back in Q3 or Q4 to talk about it, but we're going in this new direction.
Speaking of verticals, you're launching into defense. Talk to me, we understand the positioning in defense, wars, the sector is booming. The United States asking NATO countries to do more for defense. So that's the real logic. Talk to me perhaps about the commercial organization in defense and this new positioning.
It's exactly what you said, there's this demand for innovation in the army. We see drones, artificial intelligence, information that needs to be used to make decisions. The army must reinvent itself. Okay. And today, when we talk about these needs, there are many American players. There are three or four who operate in these circles. And then at the European level, there's no one. And it turns out that in recent months, recent quarters rather, several countries, several European countries have come to us to say... What are these countries asking you exactly? What do they want? Well, everything, but... Okay. But because it's precisely... Yeah, okay. It's... And you can't name the countries either. Obviously, not yet. Okay. Okay. No. So there is, seriously, a strategic axis in the defense vertical, which is that countries have come to us to discuss our solutions, how they could use them, the collaboration we could have, the conditions of this collaboration. Of course, we're talking about sovereign matters, so if you have a ministry in a country that wants to work with us, they won't work with the French, they'll work with the local teams from the same country who are accredited, who have defense clearances. And so we need to get closer to these clients, these institutions, so we have local teams accredited for defense to work locally with the different...
