French hosting and cloud provider OVH is close to finishing work on its second campus in Roubaix, in the North Eastern part of the country, with plans to launch a new data center in October.

Campus 2, marking the company’s seventh facility in the French city, will comprise a data center and offices for 200 research and communications staff.

OVH president Laurent Allard stated that rather than relocate its main offices to America, the company wishes to ground itself where it is headquartered, in Roubaix, near the Franco-Belgian border. “R&D, marketing, public relations, finance, it’s all here,” he said. 

La French touch 

OVH currently employs 1,800 people worldwide, reporting a €400m turnover this year and serving a million cloud customers across 130 countries. By 2020, it wishes to employ 4,000 people and reach €1bn in revenue, and the company is on track to meet this lofty target: for several years, it has consistently grown by at least thirty percent year-on-year, according to La Voix du Nord, and recently emerged as Europe’s largest cloud hosting provider, following its purchase of VMware’s public cloud service vCloud Air.

OVH recently obtained a €250m ($280m) investment from KKR and TowerBrook Capital Partners, following on its pledge to invest €1.5bn ($1.67bn) in the business over the next five years.

In January, the company announced plans to launch its first UK data center in 2017, and eventually add two more for backup and recovery. OVH also bought facilities in Virginia and Portland (Oregon) in the United States, as well as in Limburg, Germany, and may have plans to open a data center in Australia.

The company runs a total of 20 data centers and maintains its own fiber network in three regions  - US, Europe and Asia. So far, it has focused its coverage in Europe, where it can offer capacity of up to 11Tbps.