European GPU Clouds: 8 Alternatives to AWS and Azure for AI Workloads

European GPU cloud alternatives to AWS and Azure include full-service EU providers Scaleway and OVHcloud, AI-focused suppliers Nscale and Verda, lower-cost or compliance-oriented options Hetzner, IONOS, and Exoscale, and marketplace platforms Vast.ai and RunPod for short-term experimentation. Published September 2026 prices indicate that European H100 offerings, such as Scaleway at about EUR 2.87 per GPU-hour and OVHcloud at $2.99, are generally below AWS and Azure on-demand list prices, although hyperscaler discounts, storage, networking, interconnect, and egress costs can materially alter comparisons. The analysis distinguishes EU data residency from full sovereignty, noting that AWS and Azure EU regions retain US-parent jurisdictional exposure, while EU-owned providers may better suit workloads with stringent regulatory, DORA, or SecNumCloud-related requirements. It emphasizes that high-end H100 and H200 capacity is often constrained and requires quotas, reservations, or committed contracts, making confirmed regional availability more important than advertised prices. Provider selection should reflect workload needs, with high-bandwidth clusters for multi-node training, high-memory GPUs for fine-tuning, and lower-cost L4, L40S, or RTX hardware for inference, while Kubernetes-based deployment practices can improve portability across clouds. Migration decisions should also account for data-transfer charges, dataset replication time, temporary dual-running costs, and upcoming EU Data Act rules that will prohibit cloud switching charges from January 2027.

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