Sovereign AI for France: Snowflake and Orange Business Announce Collaboration

Adopting cutting-edge AI across France's enterprise and public sectors should not have to come at the expense of regulatory control. Digital sovereignty today hinges as much on local operational authority as it does on physical data location – enabling daily management, incident response and governance controls to remain firmly within national and continental borders.

This operational dimension lies at the heart of France's evolving security standards, including ANSSI's SecNumCloud qualification. To meet these expectations, organizations need an ecosystem where advanced analytics and local operational control work seamlessly together.

Today, Snowflake is proud to announce its intent to collaborate with Orange Business as an operating partner in France. This initiative will pair Snowflake's AI Data Cloud with Orange Business's operational expertise to deliver a sovereign-by-design data and AI platform built on sovereign infrastructure – such as Bleu – tailored for the French market.

True digital sovereignty requires protecting both data and operations: from hosting data within national borders and executing platform management through local entities, to supporting accountability under local law. Bringing these imperatives together is the ethos of a “Cloud de Confiance”, or trusted cloud environment where digital trust is built and measured across multiple dimensions, including resilience, security, privacy, regulatory compliance, data localization, operational integrity and technological autonomy.

Through this intended partnership, Orange Business will bring its extensive public sector experience and trusted end-to-end managed services to the Snowflake ecosystem.

Organizations leveraging this proposed collaboration between Snowflake and Orange Business will receive core structural benefits:

Platform operations including administration, monitoring, support and incident response will be conducted by European teams subject to EU law. Customer contracts will be established directly with Orange Business.

Regulated data stays strictly within local boundaries. The environment will be engineered to support ANSSI’s SecNumCloud qualification pathway and align with SEAL operational frameworks.

Snowflake leverages the open Apache Iceberg™ table format on S3-compatible storage. This supports data ownership and portability, allowing seamless access even if provider relationships change, which mitigates the impact of kill switch scenarios.

Snowflake Cortex AI provides access to a broad portfolio of self-hosted, open-source and frontier models, including EU models, through a single, unified API, all running within a trusted cloud perimeter. If a model becomes unavailable, is discontinued or raises regulatory concerns, customers will be able to seamlessly switch to an alternative without changing their application code or data pipelines. This model portability enables organizations to retain full control over their AI strategy without being locked into any single model provider.

Learn more about Snowflake’s data sovereignty capabilities

Forward-Looking Statements

This article contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding planned partnerships, operating models, future product availability, deployment timelines, and SecNumCloud qualification progress, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and do not represent commitments to deliver specific features or timelines. Snowflake’s operating partner arrangement with Orange Business, and associated product and service capabilities, are subject to ongoing development, partner agreements, regulatory qualification processes, and commercial finalisation. Actual results and offerings may differ materially.