OVHcloud US Celebrates 10 Years of US Growth and Innovation

OVHcloud US is celebrating its 10th anniversary this Founder’s Day, marking a decade since OVH US LLC was officially formed on August 25, 2016, and the beginning of an ambitious effort to bring a vertically integrated approach to cloud infrastructure to the US market.

The story started four years earlier with OVH founder Octave Klaba. By 2012, Klaba had built OVH into a successful European hosting company with a way of operating that was distinctly its own. The company designed and built its own servers, developed water-cooling technology and operated its own fiber network. Klaba saw that hands-on approach as a way to improve efficiency and performance while giving customers more control over the infrastructure they used. He believed the same approach could work in the United States.

Turning that idea into a US operation required significant investment. In 2013, OVH secured an approximately $181 million financing package to support new US data center construction. The plans became official on August 25, 2016, when OVH US LLC was formed. Two months later, OVH closed a €250 million investment from KKR and TowerBrook to accelerate its international expansion, with the United States identified as a priority market. That same month, Vint Hill, Virginia, was selected as the site of the company’s first US data center.

OVHcloud US entered the market with an established global business behind it. By the end of 2016, OVH had more than 1,200 employees, 20 data centers, more than 250,000 active servers and one million customers across 130 countries and four continents.

The US operation took shape quickly in 2017. OVHcloud US established its headquarters in Reston, Va., built out its executive team and announced a second data center in Hillsboro, Ore. The acquisition of VMware’s vCloud Air business that year brought experienced employees and seven additional data centers into the company, accelerating its US expansion.

“The dates tell only part of this story,” said Jeffrey Gregor, GM, OVHcloud US. “What matters most are the people who turned an ambitious idea into a US business with customers, colleagues and roots here. Octave believed cloud infrastructure could be built differently, with greater efficiency, transparency and freedom for customers. That belief remains part of our DNA, and our US team has spent the past decade putting it into practice. Founder’s Day is an opportunity to recognize what they built and recommit to that idea for the decade ahead.”

Now, OVHcloud US operates data centers in Vint Hill, Virginia, and Hillsboro, Oregon, as part of a global infrastructure that has grown from 20 data centers when the US business was formed in 2016 to 46 today. The OVHcloud global network now has 100 Tbps of capacity, connecting an infrastructure footprint that spans four continents.

That original belief in customer choice continues to guide OVHcloud US. Its portfolio spans Bare Metal Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud, allowing customers to use each environment on its own or connect them as part of a hybrid approach. The goal remains straightforward: give organizations the freedom to run workloads where they belong, with transparent pricing and no lock-in.

OVHcloud US enters its second decade as demand for cloud infrastructure continues to accelerate as AI and other compute-intensive workloads continue to increase infrastructure requirements. For OVHcloud US, that changing market reinforces the principles behind its original US expansion: infrastructure efficiency, customer choice and greater control over how and where workloads run.

Over the next two years, OVHcloud US will continue sharing the milestones that followed its 2016 formation, recognizing the people, investments and decisions that have shaped the company’s progress in the United States while looking ahead to its next decade of growth.