Scaleway continues to carve out a niche as a premium, sovereign European cloud provider with a focus on large-scale, AI training particularly for startups and non-profits.
The company’s primary offering for high-end AI is centered entirely on slurm for training. Inference, and Kubernetes in general is not a significant part of their go-forward strategy. A significant recent improvement is the deployment of a “copilot” Grafana instance, which includes essential DCGM and slurm exporters. This directly addresses a criticism we made in the first version of this article, regarding a lack of monitoring in their offering. Furthermore, Scaleway has enhanced reliability by implementing health checks through slurm prolog and epilog scripts, with monitoring data being actively managed to ensure cluster stability.
On the networking front, Scaleway continues to mainly offer H100 nodes with Nvidia’s Spectrum-X networking. They generally provide customers an opportunity to reserve clusters for days or weeks to compare its performance against traditional InfiniBand, and have seen good results. Interestingly, during testing, Scaleway worked with a customer to develop a synthetic benchmark better than nccl-tests, which indicated a 20% performance improvement over InfiniBand. However, in a crucial real-world test case, that performance advantage was not realized.
Looking ahead, Scaleway is still in the planning phase for Blackwell, and is targeting HGX B200/B300 baseboards only, rather than the fully integrated GB200 NVL systems. The company is also exploring AMD GPUs, but have yet to see significant customer traction in Europe.
Overall, Scaleway’s business model has begun to reflect a “European premium” for sovereign, GDPR-compliant infrastructure. This is evident in their resource allocation, which requires customers to contract for an entire cluster for large-scale jobs, rather than allowing on-demand access to single 8-way GPU machines. This model targets well-funded, serious AI projects, including an ecosystem built around the Scaleway Startup Program. This program offers credits and support, aiming to onboard the next generation of European tech companies.
We expect Scaleway to continue to operate in a solid niche, prioritizing dedicated, high-performance clusters for, the European market with an associated premium.