French data center and cloud firm Scaleway is to carve out its data center unit into a standalone company.
“I am pleased to announce that Scaleway's Datacenter business will be separated from Scaleway's business, into a new entity, Opcore, effective July 1st,” Arnaud de Bermingham, Scaleway president and former CEO, said on LinkedIn this week. “It's a new adventure that begins, big ambitions to become a European leader in the data center in a growing market.”
de Bermingham said he would be leading the new 46-person unit. When a commentator asked if the carve out was merely a ‘functional’ separation between technical and commercial activities, de Bermingham said the split was a “total separation.”
Parent company Iliad is yet to make an official announcement on the new unit.
Scaleway – formerly Online SAS/Online.net – was founded as a hosting company in 1999. It is part of the Iliad telco group owned by Xavier Neil. The company currently offers cloud, hosting, and colocation services.
The company launched a colocation division after acquiring Alice ADSL from Telecom Italia’s French unit in 2008.
The data center unit can trace its roots back to ISDnet in 1999. The company was first bought by Cable & Wireless in 2000, then Tiscali France in 2003. Tiscali’s French operations were then sold to Telecom Italia’s French subsidiary Alice in 2005, before being bought by Iliad three years later.
Iliad-owned Scaleway owns four data center sites across Paris totaling around 44MW, and offers cloud services from facilities from Poland and the Netherlands in Warsaw and Amsterdam. The company says it has more than 10 million sq ft in land reserves.
Scaleway has been converting the ’Abri Lefebvre’ fallout shelter into a data center over the last ten years. In September 2021, it announced the launch of a Paris Nuclear Shelter AZ in Paris, fr-par-3, based in the bunker.
Iliad operates a number of other data centers in France through its telco Free and MSP Jaguar Network. Jaguar owns data centers in Marseille and Lyon, and offers services from facilities in Paris and Bordeaux.
The company also operates around seven data centers in Poland through Play/3S. Irish telco Eir also operates two data centers in Dublin.
Whether some or all of these facilities are also set to be moved under Opcore is unclear, though filings suggest this is possible.
