The French Health Data Hub (HDH) has selected Scaleway to host its infrastructure, marking a definitive shift toward sovereign cloud solutions after years of controversy surrounding its reliance on Microsoft and exposure to the US Cloud Act. The decision follows a rigorous selection process based on over [specific criteria not fully detailed in the excerpt], ending a period of legal and political uncertainty. Scaleway, a French cloud provider, will now manage the sensitive health data platform, which aggregates and anonymizes patient data for research.
In parallel, French startup UNIVITY has raised €27 million to develop a 5G-capable space infrastructure. The funding will support the deployment of a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites designed to provide global 5G connectivity, targeting applications in remote areas, IoT, and emergency communications. The investment underscores growing European interest in sovereign space-based telecoms.
On the talent front, Devendra Chaplot, a former researcher at Mistral AI, has joined Elon Musk's xAI. Chaplot, known for his work on large language models and reinforcement learning, moves from the French AI startup to the US-based competitor, highlighting the ongoing cross-Atlantic brain drain in AI. Mistral AI, founded by ex-DeepMind and Meta researchers, has been a prominent European challenger to OpenAI and Google.