European-based cloud provider OVHcloud is expanding internationally with new data centers in Sydney and Toronto in 2024, as well as Local Zones around the world for its cloud, based on its purchase of Gridscale.

OVHcloud APAC will have a new data center in Sydney, SYD3, in spring 2024; Canada will get a new data center in Toronto, TOR1; and new capacity will be added to BHS9 in Beauharnois, Quebec, which is due to open in 2025. Meanwhile, the company's Mumbai facility will be extended. These and other announcements were presented in Paris at the company's OVHcloud Summit this week.

Thanks to its acquisition of Edge player Gridscale earlier this year, OVHcloud says it will be extending its public cloud to the edge of the network using "Local Zones," small points of presence with storage close to customers and end users, that meet local data residency requirements.

Two Local Zones are available in Madrid and Brussels, offering compute, file, block, and network, with plans for more than 18 zones through the EMEA, USA, and "rest-of-the-world" regions. OVHcloud says it is aiming for 150 new Local Zones in the next three years.

OVHcloud also extended its support for the French SecNumCloud secure cloud standard, through a third facility in Gravelines, France, following data centers at Roubaix and Strasbourg.

SecNumCloud is a national cloud security specification for France, created by ANSSI, the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information.

At OVHcloud's suggestion, ANSSI will be adding a new bare metal SecNumCloud standard, which OVHcloud plans to offer. OVHcloud says it will extend SNC qualification to its infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) offerings.

For AI, OVHcloud has launched OVHcloud Data Platform providing a "low code" approach to data and analytics. OVHcloud AI App Builder, now in alpha, is a managed serverless service to build contextualized generative AI apps and chatbots. The company also offers AI "endpoints" which give API access to several AI models, which the company says will make AI "a commodity requiring little knowledge on the customer’s side."

The event heard that OVHcloud had made "double-digit" growth in its recent 2023 results. The event heard less about the continuing lawsuits surrounding the disastrous 2021 fire that destroyed its SBG2 data center in Strasbourg.

Despite promising to do so, OVHcloud has yet to publish its own account of the causes of that fire, although published reports by the authorities have criticized it for lack of fire precautions and having wooden floors and ceilings.

Around 1,500 people attended the OVHcloud summit at La Maison de la Mutualité in Paris.