The European Space Agency has selected OVHcloud and CGI to build a new cloud infrastructure for Europe’s rapidly expanding Earth-observation data, putting European providers at the center of another strategic computing workload.
Reuters reported that the companies won a 30-month contract to develop ESA’s Digital EO system, which will combine storage, computing resources and AI tools for satellite data.
Financial terms were not fully disclosed, although OVHcloud and CGI describe the award as a multi-million-euro contract.
Europe is preparing for more than 500 petabytes of satellite data
The scale of the problem is growing quickly.
OVHcloud and CGI said ESA expects its Earth-observation holdings to exceed 500 petabytes by 2035. The new system is intended to federate data, services and processing capabilities instead of keeping them fragmented across isolated infrastructure.
That data supports applications ranging from climate research and agriculture to disaster response, environmental monitoring and commercial geospatial services.
Modern Earth-observation workloads also increasingly require computing to sit next to the data.
Moving enormous satellite datasets repeatedly across networks is inefficient, particularly when researchers want to run AI models or large-scale image-processing pipelines over them.
Digital EO is therefore being designed as both a data repository and a computing environment.
OVHcloud will provide the cloud foundation
Under the project, OVHcloud will supply compute, storage, networking and managed cloud services, while CGI will act as system architect and integrator.
Initial infrastructure will be deployed in Italy, France and Germany, with operational support from Poland and the possibility of expansion into additional European countries and Canada.
Reuters said the platform will connect with existing national and European systems and support major initiatives including Copernicus and the Destination Earth digital-twin programme.
That interoperability is significant because Europe already operates multiple Earth-observation archives, supercomputing platforms and national data systems.
Cloud sovereignty is becoming operational
The contract also reflects Europe’s broader effort to place strategically sensitive computing workloads with providers it can govern directly.
Earlier this year, OVHcloud joined other European companies in winning a European Commission sovereign-cloud framework whose maximum value is €180 million over six years.
Digital EO extends that logic into space data.
ESA’s Nicolaus Hanowski said the project is intended to create a European system capable of supporting long-term programmes including Copernicus and DestinE.
For infrastructure companies, the project illustrates how sovereignty is becoming a product requirement alongside cost, reliability and performance.
Europe does not merely want access to cloud computing. For certain workloads, it wants the ability to determine where the data sits, whose infrastructure processes it and which legal jurisdiction ultimately controls the platform.
Digital EO turns that policy objective into an engineering project measured in hundreds of petabytes.
