OVHcloud's CEO Octave Klaba reiterated the company's aim to take a piece of the AI pie during the company's Q3 2026 earnings call.
Klaba has of late shown some interest in the development of its own LLMs. Earlier this month, the CEO was reported to have said that it plans to train frontier AI models and position itself as a challenger to European AI labs.
He elaborated on this during the earnings call in response to questions as to whether it is too late for a new entrant to the LLM game.
"The question is: AI, it’s too late for us? No, definitely not. We are in the game because the investment is lower right now to invest in AI. It’s eight to 10 times less expensive, and you have more teams available on the market.
"You have a lot of papers with the research on the market. You can create scientific data. So it is easier to go into this market four years after. The market is not done in Europe. We are still looking for sovereignty in this market. The current players, they are not good. We think that we can be good in our vertical that is cloud."
The company saw revenues of €289.6 million ($330m) for the quarter, a 6.9 percent increase Year-on-Year (YoY), and a sequential increase from the previous two quarters, which brought in €275.3m ($314m) and €280m ($319m), respectively.
With the latest results, revenue for the first nine months of the year has reached almost €845m ($963m), with the company likely to comfortably surpass 2025's annual revenue of €1.084bn ($1.2bn), though still a way off the company's eventual goal of a €2bn annual revenue.
Private cloud remained the company's main money maker, bringing in €174m ($198m) in sales, up 2.8 percent. CFO Stephanie Besnier noted that this is reflective of a growing corporate segment and "ramp-up of strategic deals," but offset by "an infrastructure-optimizing movement as some customers right-size an environment or churn impacted by Broadcom’s price increases."
Public cloud was by far growing fastest, with a YoY increase of 22.3 percent to €65.6m ($75m) for the quarter - described by Besnier as the clear "standout performer this quarter," noting that this is the first time the company's growth rate is back above 20 percent since Q4 2023.
OVH doesn't disclose specific capex numbers for the quarter, but for the full year is targeting a capex of between 33 and 35 percent of its revenue. The company estimates 2026 will see full-year growth of between five and seven percent on the year prior; on the higher end, this would bring total revenue to €1.16bn ($1.3bn), and capex could reach €406m ($462m).
This is significantly less than the larger US hyperscalers, but according to chairman and CEO Klaba, this is a strategic choice.
Klaba said that, for him, debt at a ratio of below three times is "a red line."
"Our goal is to keep that less than three, because its whatI have done for 27 years or more, and that is where we will be."
The issue of memory supply chains was referenced, with CFO Besnier noting that the company has been forced to increase prices for customers.
"We live an exceptional situation," he said. "As of today, we estimate that the cost of memory has been multiplied by six in the last 12 months. We consider that it will be multiplied by nine in September. We have massive price increases on the disk, and now we are hearing inflation potential on the CPUs.
"What we’ve done, as you know, first, we have front-loaded our purchasing. We’ve front-loaded the capex for 2026, and front-loaded the capex for 2027. We disclosed it in H1, we’ve made some savings. Second, yes, we’ve increased the prices. We’ve been very transparent on that topic with our customers. We’ve decided to increase the prices, and we’ve implemented these increases in April and May. We’re comfortable for now with this level of price increases."