OVH EUROPEAN CLOUD EXPANSION

The project is composed of different components, that enable the company's growth and European expansion strategy. The key investments concern the increase of server capacity, complemented by investments for the construction of several new data centre facilities, either at existing or new sites, in order to also support the geographic expansion. Furthermore, the project includes software and hardware research and development (R&D) to expand the range of services. The main location of these investments is France, complemented by Germany and Poland to further grow the business inside Europe.

The investments in the expansion and the capacity increase will allow the company to grow the business by adding more hardware into existing sites and through a geographic expansion within Europe. As those data centres are located in Europe and are operated by a European company, they provide a good GDPR-compliant alternative to the large non-European service providers for European autonomy, by the strengthening of a European data centre operator.

The project contributes to the policy objectives of Innovation and Digitalisation by supporting innovation enabling digital infrastructure. It concerns investments in the modernisation and construction of data centers and servers. The project addresses a market failure of under investment in secure data centres that can guarantee data sovereignty for Europe and it will accelerate the deployment of innovative and secure digital technologies and thus generate positive network externalities by enabling more users to benefit from improved and faster and safe access to information and innovative digital services. These benefits are not fully captured by the project.

The operation is aligned with the Bank's public policy goal "Innovation, Digital and Human Capital".

EIB's loan provides a highly flexible financial product to allow the client to finance its planned investments to fuel its geographical expansion and capacity increase.

Furthermore, by allowing the client to diversify its financing sources in the current market environment, the EIB sends the market a strong message of support for the counterparty and the project.

Investments for the construction of data centres might fall under the Annexes of Directive 2014/52/EU amending the EIA Directive 2011/92/EU. As the project represents a mixture of greenfield deployments and upgrades of existing facilities, therefore the appropriate level of required environmental approvals will be assessed for the different cases during the project appraisal stage.

The promoter is a publicly listed company operating in the Telecom sector, which is exempted from public procurement requirements. The procedures applied will be verified in detail during the appraisal.