French AI cloud startup Policloud has secured a €580 million framework contract with CloudGrid Energy to deploy a European sovereign AI platform across 16 sites in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. The full deployment covers 280 modular units, 29,000 GPUs, two million CPUs, and 35 megawatts of compute capacity, all scheduled to be live by the end of 2027.
The modular approach behind the contract is what makes Policloud’s model stand out from traditional data center builds. Each Policloud unit is a containerized, waterless-cooled micro data center that can house up to 400 GPUs, occupies up to 100 square meters of space, and draws up to 500 kilowatts of power. Rather than concentrating infrastructure in one location, Policloud distributes units across multiple sites, each sitting at a renewable energy facility. The first unit, located in Bonne Voisine, France, is already operational.
The sustainability angle is built into the architecture rather than bolted on as an afterthought. CloudGrid Energy specifically colocates compute infrastructure at renewable power assets, which means the AI workloads running across these 16 sites draw directly from clean energy sources rather than connecting to mixed-source grids.
Policloud CEO David Gurle, who previously founded Symphony and held senior roles at Microsoft, shared the news on LinkedIn and noted that this contract, combined with others the company expects to announce, has pushed the company well past its original target of 100 units by the end of 2026. The new trajectory points toward 1,000 Policloud units by 2030, a goal Gurle suggested may now arrive ahead of schedule.
The company only started in 2025 and raised €7.5 million in seed funding from Global Ventures, OneRagtime, Inria, and others. Policloud operates under Antimatter, a neocloud platform Gurle also founded, and uses distributed storage and compute infrastructure from Hivenet across its network of units.
For European organizations seeking AI compute that stays within European jurisdiction and runs on renewable energy, the combination of sovereign cloud positioning and clean power sourcing gives Policloud a pitch that addresses two concerns simultaneously rather than forcing a tradeoff between them.
