As with AI, blockchain and cybersecurity, value is layered, from land and energy all the way up to business applications.
4.1The physical base: data centres
Everything "virtual" rests on buildings: land, electricity, cooling, fibre. Players: Equinix, Digital Realty, Data4, OVHcloud. Energy increasingly dictates the geography of the sector.
4.2Hyperscalers: a global oligopoly
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate global cloud infrastructure, with more than 60% of the market between them. Their strength: economies of scale, service catalogues and massive investment, now directed towards AI.
4.3Data software vendors
Above the cloud: Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, Confluent, Palantir. A large share of innovation comes from open-source software (PostgreSQL, Spark, Kubernetes) monetised as managed versions.
4.4Services
Integrators, IT services companies and data consultancies capture a large share of spending: Capgemini, Accenture, Sopra Steria, data consulting, managed services. As with AI, the technology is available; adoption is the hard part.
4.5The grey economy of data brokers
Data brokers collect, cross-reference and resell profiles: purchases, location, browsing, interests. Legal under certain conditions, this market feeds targeted advertising and concerns about commercial surveillance.
4.6The application layer
Business SaaS, open data, digital public services. In France, DINUM (the government's digital agency) runs shared state resources such as data.gouv.fr and La Suite numérique.
Sovereignty: where does France stand?
The "Cloud au centre" doctrine requires public administrations to host their sensitive data on SecNumCloud-certified clouds. OVHcloud, Outscale, NumSpot, S3NS and soon Bleu embody different answers to the same dilemma: legal sovereignty or technological sovereignty?
Sources
Synergy Research/Statista, cloud market shares; ANSSI, SecNumCloud; Usine Digitale on S3NS; Legiscope, SecNumCloud et RGPD.
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