Airbus is migrating 70 critical enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, manufacturing) from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty concerns.

Airbus is migrating 70 of its most critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty. The aerospace manufacturer is relocating a total of 900 applications—including ERP, CRM, manufacturing execution systems, and product lifecycle management—to ensure its data remains "under European control."

Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, explained the decision: "The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers' public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap. The objective is to host Airbus's most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS."

The migration reflects heightened European concern about US technology dependence, particularly following geopolitical tensions under the Trump administration and concerns about the US Cloud Act, which permits the American government to request data held in overseas datacenters owned by US businesses. European cloud providers historically lacked the scale of their US rivals, making the tender outcome uncertain when the process began.

Airbus will maintain AWS for non-critical workloads, including Skywise—a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data—and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries. The company will also continue using other US providers, including Salesforce, Coupa, and Workday.

"By integrating a trusted, high performance cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations," Jestin said.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google have worked to convince customers they can provide digitally sovereign services, though a Microsoft executive previously admitted in French court that he could not guarantee digital sovereignty. Airbus's approach reflects the broader European pattern: becoming more self-sufficient while pragmatically balancing sovereignty concerns with necessity. "We do not intend to move away from all non-European solutions; we balance our choices based on the criticality of the data," Jestin said.