Scaleway is a French-rooted provider that keeps every region inside the European Union and then layers a hyperscaler-style toolset on top: Projects, Identity and Access Management, managed Kubernetes, S3-compatible object storage and GPU services. That combination is rarer than either half alone. This article explains what the platform offers, how its residency story differs from a hyperscaler’s EU region, and what the option on the Buy Scaleway Account page, the Scaleway ID Verified+Card Account ($60), indicates.
Residency by design, not by region choice
Regions in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw each contain multiple Availability Zones, so you can build a highly available architecture without any resource leaving the EU. With a hyperscaler you achieve residency by carefully selecting regions; with Scaleway there is no non-EU region to select by mistake. For organisations whose processing agreements reference GDPR and extraterritorial legislation, that structural guarantee simplifies the paperwork. The wider set of options is laid out in European data residency cloud providers.
Scaleway also reports on energy use and runs data centres with attention to power usage effectiveness, which matters to teams tracking environmental impact alongside cost.
The catalogue in one view
| Service | What it is | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Instances | Virtual machines from development to high-CPU and high-memory ranges | Web apps, APIs, staging |
| Elastic Metal | Bare-metal servers integrated with cloud networking | Databases, latency-sensitive work |
| Kapsule | Managed Kubernetes | Container platforms |
| Object Storage | S3-compatible buckets with cold storage classes | Assets, backups, datasets |
| Managed Databases | PostgreSQL, MySQL and related engines | Removing database operations |
| GPU Instances and Managed Inference | NVIDIA accelerators and dedicated inference endpoints | Training, fine-tuning, serving models |
Serverless functions and containers sit alongside for event-driven pieces. The point is that a team can start on a development Instance and move to Kapsule or Elastic Metal later without changing provider or jurisdiction.
Projects and IAM: the developer-tooling core
An account contains Projects, and Projects contain resources. That gives you a natural boundary per client, per environment or per team, each with its own API keys. Identity and Access Management policies then decide who and what can act inside each Project. Together these are what make Scaleway comfortable for infrastructure as code: a Terraform workspace per Project, a scoped key per pipeline, and no shared root credential in any CI system. The starting pattern is described in infrastructure as code for a brand-new cloud account.
Private Networks give resources internal addressing, and Security Groups act as virtual firewalls on Instances. Set both before deploying anything public.
Billing that caps itself
Many resources are billed hourly with monthly caps, so a long-running Instance never costs more than its monthly ceiling while a short experiment costs only its hours. Delete unused Instances, volumes and snapshots promptly; hourly charges accumulate while resources exist. Credits, when present on an account, apply to eligible services for a defined period and should be confirmed in the console.
What the ID Verified+Card option indicates
The listing name describes the account’s state rather than its resources: identity verification has been completed and a payment card is on file, which are the two steps a new account usually passes before it can provision widely. The correct way to use such an account is within Scaleway’s terms. After a legitimate transfer, replace the payment method with your own, update contact and organisation details so they are accurate, change the password, enable multi-factor authentication, and rotate every API key. Verification exists to tie an account to a real, responsible owner; keeping the details truthful is what preserves the account’s standing.
Where GPU and AI work fits
GPU Instances range from entry-level to high-end accelerators, and Managed Inference provides dedicated GPU infrastructure for serving curated or custom models inside the same EU jurisdiction. That is the distinctive offer: model serving without moving data outside Europe. Because accelerator resources bill on usage, treat them like any hourly resource and shut them down between runs; the same discipline applies to every accelerator.
How Scaleway compares
Against its French-rooted neighbour the differences are in tooling and product breadth: Scaleway vs OVH accounts. Against the German price-performance leader the trade is managed services for raw value: Scaleway vs Hetzner accounts. Account questions are collected in the Scaleway section of the Cloud FAQ.
