Scaleway
French cloud provider with sovereign EU LLM inference
Scaleway is a French cloud provider offering GPU compute and LLM inference with a focus on European data sovereignty. Their Generative APIs service hosts Llama 3.3 and other open-weight models, making them a strong choice for European businesses with data residency requirements.
The strongest European data sovereignty credentials — a French company with French data centres, ideal for organisations with strict EU data residency requirements.
- French cloud — strongest EU data sovereignty credentials
- GDPR-compliant with data centres in France and Netherlands
- GPU compute + LLM inference from one provider
- Competitive pricing for European market
- Long-established cloud provider (founded 1999)
- Smaller model catalog than US-based inference providers
- Lower throughput than speed-optimised providers
- Less developer tooling than OpenAI or Anthropic
All Models
Scaleway — Frequently Asked Questions
Community Reviews
All LLM Providers
Full comparison tableScaleway LLM pricing overview
Scaleway is an inference API provider that hosts open-weight and third-party large language models. Scaleway is a French cloud provider offering GPU compute and LLM inference with a focus on European data sovereignty. Their Generative APIs service hosts Llama 3.3 and other open-weight models, making them a strong choice for European businesses with data residency requirements. Common use cases include European compliance, French data sovereignty, GDPR, Open-source. Headquartered in Paris, France, founded 1999. All models are accessible via a REST API compatible with standard OpenAI-style request formats, enabling drop-in integration with most LLM frameworks and orchestration tools.
Scaleway vs other LLM providers
Scaleway competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Together AI, Mistral, Cohere, and other inference API providers across dimensions of price, throughput, latency, context window, and model intelligence. The strongest European data sovereignty credentials — a French company with French data centres, ideal for organisations with strict EU data residency requirements. Use the LLM provider comparison tool to see Scaleway token pricing, latency, and throughput side-by-side with any other provider. The full LLM pricing table shows all providers ranked by input token cost, output token cost, and throughput in a single sortable view.
Why choose Scaleway?
Scaleway's key strengths are: French cloud — strongest EU data sovereignty credentials; GDPR-compliant with data centres in France and Netherlands; GPU compute + LLM inference from one provider. Limitations to consider: Smaller model catalog than US-based inference providers; Lower throughput than speed-optimised providers. For teams running high-volume inference workloads, prompt caching and batch API endpoints can reduce effective input token costs by 50–90% — check the context window cost guide for a full breakdown of caching economics.
Understanding Scaleway token pricing
Scaleway charges separately for input (prompt) and output (completion) tokens, priced per 1M tokens in USD. Output tokens are typically 3–5× more expensive than input tokens due to the compute cost of autoregressive generation. Prices shown are sourced from Scaleway's public pricing page and updated daily. Need help estimating your spend? Read the LLM API cost calculator guide — it covers tokens, context windows, prompt caching, and batch discounts with worked examples for RAG, chat history, and document processing workloads.
Scaleway context window and model capabilities
Context window size directly affects both capability and cost — every token in the context window is charged as an input token. For RAG and document processing workloads, longer context windows enable richer retrieval but increase per-call costs proportionally. Prompt caching — where supported — stores the KV state of repeated prefixes and charges 75–90% less for cache hits, making it the most impactful cost optimization for applications with consistent system prompts or retrieved documents. See the LLM context window cost guide for a full analysis of how context length affects your API bill.
Self-hosted vs managed inference: when Scaleway makes sense
Managed inference APIs like Scaleway eliminate infrastructure overhead — no GPU provisioning, driver management, or model serving stack to maintain. The trade-off is cost at scale: a single H100 at ~$2.50/hr can serve ~500K tokens/min of Llama 3.3 70B, which at Scaleway API rates would cost significantly more per token. The break-even point depends on your request volume, latency requirements, and engineering capacity. For teams processing fewer than ~10M tokens/day, managed APIs are almost always cheaper when total cost of ownership is considered. Above that threshold, self-hosted inference on rented GPU compute typically wins on unit economics. Read the cheapest GPU cloud guide for a full break-even analysis. Historical Scaleway token price data is available in the LLM price history charts.