OVHcloud confirms outlook as public cloud growth tops 20%

Europe’s largest cloud provider, OVHcloud, posted stronger third-quarter revenue and reaffirmed its full-year guidance, fueled by a public cloud segment that has surged back above the 20% growth mark.

The Roubaix-based company, often championed by France as a homegrown rival to American hyperscalers, reported revenue of €289.6 million for the three months ending in May. This represents a 6.9% like-for-like increase and a 6.5% rise as reported, according to the company’s latest financial release.

The sequential acceleration is notable, climbing from the 5.1% organic growth seen in the second quarter. For the first nine months, revenue reached €844.9 million, up 6.0% overall.

The growth spurt was driven almost entirely by Public Cloud, which now accounts for just under 23% of total revenue. This segment expanded 20.2% on a like-for-like basis to €65.6 million, a sharp rebound from the 12.9% growth recorded in the previous quarter. OVHcloud attributed this recovery to strong customer acquisition among its smaller “Starters” accounts, especially for virtual private server products, alongside the expansion of its three-availability-zone regions in Paris and Milan.

Without this public cloud performance, the headline numbers would have been far less impressive. The other two segments continued their recent trends. Private Cloud, still the largest business at 60% of revenue, grew 4.0% to €174.0 million. Growth among corporate clients helped offset churn from customers affected by Broadcom’s price increases on VMware. Web Cloud, the legacy domain-names and hosting division, edged up 2.0% to €50.0 million, with existing customers maintaining spending and the net revenue retention rate hitting 102% on a like-for-like basis.

Chairman and CEO Octave Klaba noted that the group had “maintained strict financial discipline” and reaffirmed its target of positive levered free cash flow for the year. OVHcloud confirmed all of its FY2026 objectives: organic revenue growth between 5% and 7%, an adjusted EBITDA margin above FY2025 levels, and adjusted capital expenditure of 33% to 35% of revenue, excluding stock locked under dedicated financing.

Beyond the numbers, the quarter’s narrative was shaped by the ongoing debate over what defines a European cloud. The consortium of POST Luxembourg’s DEEP unit, OVHcloud, and Clever Cloud was one of four winners of the European Commission’s €180 million sovereign cloud contract for EU institutions. The framework runs up to six years, and the Commission deliberately split it four ways to avoid reliance on a single vendor. OVHcloud, regularly cited as France’s largest cloud company and one of the few genuine European alternatives to hyperscalers, has also been selected as a subcontractor for the European Central Bank’s digital euro project.

Yet the question persists: does any of this amount to sovereignty beyond the procurement sense? OVHcloud operates its own 46 datacentres, but the wider stack still depends on chips designed and manufactured outside Europe. Critics argue this gap turns much of the continent’s sovereign-cloud ambition into managed dependence rather than true independence.

The company spent the quarter trying to strengthen the parts of the stack it can control. It entered exclusive negotiations to acquire Gladia, a voice-AI specialist, integrating its speech-to-text technology into the OVHai unit. At VivaTech in Paris, it previewed OVHai Workspace, an agentic AI platform that bundles email, storage, and video conferencing with end-to-end encryption. It also reorganized its corporate sales force across six countries under a new chief revenue officer, Bruno Ronsse, a move targeting the “trusted cloud” demand generated by the sovereignty debate.

Geographically, growth was broad. France, which accounts for just under half of group revenue, rose 5.8% like-for-like. The rest of Europe grew 7.4%, more than double its first-half rate, thanks to stronger public cloud momentum. The rest of the world increased 8.6%. OVHcloud now serves 1.6 million customers across more than 140 countries, and crossed the billion-euro revenue mark for the first time in its last full year. The group will report its full-year results on October 20.