The European Space Agency has entrusted OVHcloud and CGI with a 30-month contract to design and deploy the digital infrastructure that will store and process data derived from Earth observation.
The project, dubbed Digital EO (the ESA Earth Observation Information System), aims to unify data, services, and computing capabilities for scientists, public authorities, businesses, and citizens alike.
Both groups describe the contract as “several million euros.” The ESA, for its part, has not disclosed a figure, Reuters reports.
A decentralized architecture
The ESA describes a decentralized, scalable, and resilient system designed to manage more than 500 petabytes of heterogeneous data with computing power and artificial intelligence resources. It will need to federate with national and European infrastructures, while governing the development, deployment, and governance of algorithms, applications, and services—whether scientific, public, commercial, or citizen-oriented.
It is designed to feed EU programs such as Copernicus and DestinE, the digital twin of the Earth.
OVHcloud will provide the backbone, including computing, storage, networking, and managed cloud services. The system will be deployed first in Italy, France, and Germany, with support operations managed from Poland. It can then be extended to additional European countries as well as Canada. The group will support its evolution over time.
CGI, through its CGI France Defense and Space subsidiary, will act as the architect and integrator of the “Digital EO backbone,” the technological and operational spine of the platform. It will also help to energize the ecosystem: managing data resources, services, and user communities, offering user and developer support, and driving continuous improvement.
A European-preferred context
This award underscores the European Commission’s intent to steer strategic contracts toward European suppliers. It comes after an April cloud procurement exercise worth €180 million, awarded exclusively to four European companies.
At the start of September, the ESA also awarded parallel study contracts to teams led by Finnish ICEYE and Italian Leonardo to design a separate, security-focused Earth observation architecture intended for EU governments.
These elements sketch a coherent path, though sources offer little beyond what is stated: they do not specify selection criteria, potential competitors, or deployment timelines beyond the contract’s duration.
Mistral, another European ESA partner
On September 16, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, signed a letter of intent that sets a framework for collaboration in artificial intelligence.
The document aims to explore the use of models, cloud infrastructure, and Mistral’s technical capabilities in Earth observation, engineering, advanced AI for space, and training.
The agreement builds on existing projects, including Orbit, a secure AI assistant for engineering, and EVE (Earth Virtual Expert), developed with European partners by ESA’s Φ-lab for Earth observation. It is an exploratory framework with no established link to Digital EO.
