France’s OVHcloud bets on frontier AI as Europe seeks alternatives to US models
France’s OVHcloud is moving beyond cloud infrastructure into frontier AI model development, a shift that could test whether Europe can produce another serious alternative to US and Chinese AI systems. The company, one of Europe’s leading homegrown cloud providers, plans to train a family of models from scratch and aims to open-source them once they meet its performance targets, CEO Octave Klaba told Reuters. The move would put OVHcloud in closer comparison with Mistral AI, the Paris-based model developer that has become Europe’s most visible challenger to US AI labs. Klaba said the economics of building advanced AI models have changed, with improvements in chips, training methods, and synthetic data reducing the cost of a project that may once have required about $1.15 billion (€1 billion) to now cost less than $230 million (€200 million). Reuters reported that OVHcloud said one of its models has completed pre-training on Jupiter, the Germany-based EuroHPC supercomputer described as Eu