On 4 April, cloud services provider AWS welcomed more than 9,000 people to the Palais des Congrès in Paris for its annual event, AWS Summit. It was an opportunity to review the investments made in France and the desire to expand in Europe. The cloud giant also announced the launch of two programmes aimed at start-ups.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was present in Paris on 4 April to give an update on its cloud solutions and to highlight its customers and partners. The American provider is making a comeback with its Summit 2023. Julien Groues, country manager of AWS France and Italy, launched the day with a keynote speech in which various customers spoke about their migration to AWS tools. For the occasion, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Technology AWS was also present in front of more than 9,000 people (8,000 entries were registered in 2022). During this morning, the testimonies were multiplied. Alix Boulnois, chief digital officer of Accor and Cédric Lewandowski, executive director and director of the nuclear and thermal park of the EDF group, spoke about the reasons that led these two large French companies to adopt AWS solutions.

Other companies also shared their feedback, from a distance. These included Air Liquide, Compagnie des Alpes, eTF1 and more recent companies such as Hugging Face, Mano Mano, Metron and Swile. The objective is clear for the cloud giant: to remind people of the extent to which it is everywhere, in all sectors of activity and with ever more varied use cases. "AWS in France represents 6 billion euros of investment over the 2017-2031 period. More than 80% of the CAC40 and more than 75% of the Next40 are customers," says Julien Groues. To date, the firm has no less than 1,000 employees spread between Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Paris and Toulouse and claims to have trained more than 100,000 people in the cloud.

Europe, a rapidly expanding market

At European level, the figures speak for themselves: 42% of EU companies use the AWS cloud. Defining itself as "competitive, secure and sustainable", it is not afraid to ride the green trend that is taking hold of the continent to be more attractive. "We are working hard to build a sustainable infrastructure. This includes the energy we consume. 95% of the electricity we use in Europe for our data centres is from renewable sources. Praising the savings that companies can make by switching to the cloud - in the order of "30% on average" - Julien Groues took advantage of the event to make a subtle announcement: the launch of the European Defence Accelerator for start-ups.

In its press release, the company said that "the aim of this accelerator is to support start-ups with AWS technologies to deliver energy resilience, secure information sharing, sensing and decision-making, quantum and cyber resilience solutions to support a range of customer needs"In the sights, it is the Defence and National Security sector that is obviously the end customer. In detail, the accelerator is open to start-ups from all over the world who want to do business with defence and national security organisations across Europe. The four-week programme offers a combination of technical support (including the provision of the vendor's cloud technologies), commercial support (including go-to-market advice and investment guidance) and mentoring, all in partnership with Plexal, a UK government-backed IT company. Around 15 start-ups will be selected after demonstrating the existence of customers and revenues and the ability to use AWS cloud services to solve the challenges of defence and national security missions. Applications are open until 1 July 2023.

AI is not left out

AWS has understood that artificial intelligence is on the rise, and even more so the generative version. Even though it has been working on AI and machine learning for years, it wants to stay one step ahead of the growing number of competing solutions. To this end, the firm today announced a Generative AI Accelerator, a programme aimed at helping early-stage start-ups in the generative AI sector in their development. Over the course of 10 weeks, founders of these companies will undergo a programme on go-to-market strategies tailored to generative AI, machine learning stack optimisation, and will also have access to the latest AI models and tools. Applications for the programme are open from today and will be accepted until 17 April.