OVHcloud’s launch of its first Asia Pacific Local Zone in Auckland, New Zealand, through a partnership with Datacentre220, is the visible tip of a broader strategic push into the region. Behind the infrastructure announcement lies a considered approach to sovereignty that the service provider argues goes well beyond the claims of its larger American rivals – and a view that the geopolitical climate is finally making that case for them.
Terry Maiolo (above), OVHcloud’s vice president and general manager for APAC, is direct about why Auckland came before any other market in the region. “When we launch a local zone, it’s two opportunities for us,” he said. “It is, number one, the local market and the opportunity for customers there to experience or have access to something that is truly sovereign, as well as the low latency and the performance that comes with that.” But the second opportunity, he adds, is just as important: existing OVHcloud customers in other markets who need to extend their services to customers or operations within New Zealand itself.
The choice of a Local Zone rather than a full data centre is also deliberate. OVHcloud already operates three data centres in Sydney, hosted within Equinix and NextDC facilities, but the service provider draws a clear distinction between its full regional deployments and Local Zones, which are designed as edge extensions to bring compute closer to specific markets.
Maiolo explains that a full data centre requires considerably more than taking up rack space. “We have a very unique cooling solution. We use water cooling direct to the chip and don’t use air conditioning,” he said, adding that every deployment requires OVHcloud to introduce its own infrastructure model – what the service provider calls a “shell and core” build.
The Local Zone model allows OVHcloud to enter a market, test demand, and build a relationship with the local customer base before committing to that level of investment. “It’ll be the take-up of that particular service, the local zone, that might help us decide where next,” Maiolo said.
The sovereignty argument
Much of the conversation around OVHcloud’s positioning returns to sovereignty, a term that has become increasingly contested as US hyperscalers have invested heavily in local infrastructure and compliance frameworks across the region. Maiolo points to structural rather than operational reasons why OVHcloud believes it offers something genuinely different.
The core of his argument rests on two pieces of US legislation: the CLOUD Act and the Patriot Act. “If you are connected in any way – your infrastructure or service provider structure, which is global – and that includes the US, then you will fall under the CLOUD Act or Patriot Act,” he said. This was tested in a court case in France in 2025 involving Microsoft which had confirmed that the CLOUD Act extended to that service provider’s operations regardless of where data was physically held.
OVHcloud’s response to this is structural. Its US business operates as a ring-fenced entity, isolated from the rest of the group. “Customer information, any infrastructure, anyone supporting that business cannot support both,” Maiolo explained. Customer service for the US operation is handled from a dedicated, physically separate section of the service provider’s India facility, with no access to information from other geographies. “We take that very, very seriously and therefore hold ourselves to the highest standard of GDPR.”
The service provider also controls its full technology stack in a way that few providers can claim. OVHcloud operates two server manufacturing facilities – one in Canada, one in Croix, France – and builds its own hardware. “All of the components come in and nobody else touches that server. We know exactly every component and what sits in our servers,” Maiolo said. That supply chain control extends to how servers are racked and distributed to each deployment, whether a Local Zone or a full data centre.
The final element of the sovereignty proposition is what OVHcloud does – or rather does not do – with customer data. “We do not monetise any of our data,” Maiolo said. “We are a pure cloud player.”
The New Zealand market: gateway or destination?
For Datacentre220, OVHcloud’s arrival is the latest in a pattern of international providers choosing its Auckland facility as their point of entry into New Zealand. Ross Delaney, the company’s CEO (above), describes the facility’s role in terms that go beyond colocation. “We’ve been one of the best-kept secrets in New Zealand,” he said. “For us, this is just another vote of confidence in us as a data centre to help international players land and expand in New Zealand.”
Delaney’s framing of Datacentre220’s role is as a connectivity hub rather than simply a hosting provider. “We often are seen as like the gateway, or the modem, to New Zealand,” he said. “We punch well above our weight in terms of who we have within the facility.” That connectivity density is central to why a sovereign cloud provider like OVHcloud would choose a colocation partner over building its own facility: it provides immediate access to peering options, enterprise and government connectivity, and the broader New Zealand network ecosystem without the capital commitment of a purpose-built site.
Delaney sees the timing of OVHcloud’s arrival as no accident. He has been a vocal advocate for digital sovereignty in the New Zealand market for some years, and argues that the conversation has materially shifted. “Going back a few years, I’ve been a big voice in the market about digital sovereignty, ownership of your data,” he said. “Now we are seeing it.”
Two factors are driving that shift, in his view. The first is the growth of AI, and specifically enterprise demand for running AI models on infrastructure where data ownership is clear. “People wanting to run their own AI themselves, rather than farming their data out to other platforms – we’ve seen a huge uptick in that,” Delaney said. A platform like OVHcloud, running locally in New Zealand within a New Zealand-owned facility, is well positioned for that use case.
The second is a broader rebalancing of cloud strategy after what Delaney characterises as a period of uncritical public cloud adoption. “The answer was public cloud – sorry, what was the question again?” he said. “And now it’s changed back to connecting into the right cloud and the right platform for the right reasons. We’re seeing it a lot in the data centre at the moment – people getting that hybrid balance back.”
Geopolitical tailwinds
Maiolo acknowledges that the current environment is creating commercial opportunities for OVHcloud that might have taken longer to materialise in more stable times. “OVHcloud, because of the geopolitical climate and a lot of heat everywhere, is being sought out by many different organisations who are looking to do things differently,” he said. “They’re looking to lessen their exposure. And that’s been really beneficial for us.” He added that inquiry into OVHcloud’s APAC services had “increased significantly”, with January 2025 marking a notable inflection point.
That trend intersects with the New Zealand government’s growing, if still developing, awareness of digital sovereignty as a policy issue. Delaney recently hosted government officials at the Datacentre220 facility for a discussion on exactly these themes. “I think there’s a lot more education and understanding to go on,” he said, arguing that government, businesses, and citizens alike need to better understand where their data resides and why it matters.
“Having platforms like OVHcloud in here are going to allow people to continue to innovate and keep that data here, rather than large American platforms may not always working in the best interests of the local market,” he added.
Connectivity drive
He is also pressing the case for greater investment in the connectivity infrastructure that underpins any serious cloud ecosystem – specifically subsea cables linking New Zealand to Australia, Southeast Asia, and beyond. “The data centre market is asking very loudly now,” he said, pointing to a recently formed coalition of New Zealand data centre operators, ranging from smaller providers through to major players including CDC, DCI, AWS, Microsoft, Datacom, and Ten Peaks, that has come together to educate the government on the importance of that infrastructure investment.
“The more that comes in country, and the more the government’s aware of it, the more the economy will benefit from it,” Delaney said. “New Zealand’s got to step up, and the government’s got to do a strong job of promoting New Zealand as a safe destination for international investment.”
For OVHcloud, Maiolo is clear that the deployment model – enter through a Local Zone, build market understanding, and scale from there – is how the service provider approaches new territories. Whether that eventually leads to a full OVHcloud data centre in New Zealand will depend on what the market tells them. For now, the European-headquartered challenger has made its first move in the NZ market, and it has done so in a way that puts sovereignty, not just latency, at the centre of the pitch.