Structural and financial risks in OVHcloud’s Strasbourg rebuild

Design flaws and fire behavior

The fire destroyed SBG2. This 5-story, 500 sqm facility housed 30,000 servers. The building used a cooling design based on convection and auto-ventilation. This system allowed the fire to act like a chimney. The facility lacked a VESDA system and water or gas fire suppression. Firefighters identified that two uninterruptible power supplies sat at the center of the blaze. While firefighters attempted to cut the power at 1.13am, electricity continued to flow into the building until at least 03:28am according to the firefighters’ reports from the local fire department. The fire started in the power room at 12.40am on March 10, 2021. High moisture readings appeared near an inverter an hour before the flames broke out. The investigation by the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis of Industrial Risks confirmed moisture near an inverter. At the height of the fire, 3.6 million websites and 464,000 domain names were unavailable. A Franco-German pump ship on the Rhine helped 100 firefighters and 44 vehicles. The diesel generators even started up automatically as the building burned. The building also had wooden floors. Thirty OVHcloud employees worked on a 24/7 rotation to manage the site. SBG1 was terminally damaged. After the fire, the company had to deliver 14,472 Bare Metal servers to customers. They also had to restore 30,775 VPS services. One hundred and fifty servers still needed reconnection in SBG1. Firefighters arrived at the scene one minute before 1am and found electrical arcs more than one meter long flashing around the power room door.

Data loss and legal liabilities

Data loss remains a central risk. Bati Courtage lost its website because OVHcloud stored backups in the same building as the main server. The court ruled that the contract required the backup space to be physically isolated. Bluepad lost its production and backup data because both systems were in SBG2. OVH engineers restarted a server and an automated script purged the data. You should know that the Bati Courtage contract never mentioned local backups. The court ordered OVHcloud to pay compensation. They appealed. More than 130 customers joined a class-action suit led by Ziegler & Associates. The company faces claims because it failed to protect customer data. For Bluepad, the court ordered compensation for the reconstitution of the database, loss of sales, loss of customers, and non-pecuniary damage. These amounts totaled €153,837. Bati Courtage claimed €38,530 for financial loss, €26,472 for intangible assets, €20,000 for brand damage, and €9,100 for data restoration. Bluepad is a SaaS provider in Metz. The litigation occurs in the Lille Commercial Court. The case for Bluepad is different because Bluepad managed its own backup. The judge ruled that the location of servers was contractual. The company faces claims from many users. The Bati Courtage case was based on its understanding that backup data was stored in a separate building. The court found that the contract stipulated that the storage space was physically isolated from the infrastructure in which the VPS server was set up. This was not the case as both systems were in the same building. The company’s turnover was only €2 million in 2018.

The legal battles continue.

Hardware inflation and reconstruction costs

Rebuilding the Strasbourg site faces extreme hardware inflation. A global memory shortage hit the industry in late 2025. DDR4 prices climbed 158% and DDR5 prices surged 307% since September 2025. OVHcloud projections suggest RAM prices will rise 250% to 300% by the end of 2026 compared to September 2025. The company expects the fire to cost €105 million. This massive cost creates pressure on the rebuild timeline. OVHcloud is expanding to 44 data centers, including a new facility in Milan. The 2026 hardware lineup includes Scale, Advance, Game, and Rise servers. Scale servers use AMD EPYC 9005 processors and support up to 3 TB of DDR5 memory. The Advance range supports container clusters and blockchain validation nodes. The Game range is for the iGaming market. The Rise range uses AMD Zen 5 microarchitecture for intensive web workloads. OVHcloud has invested €1 billion in products and infrastructure since its IPO. They have opened ten additional data centers since 2021. OVHcloud operates 46 data centers worldwide. They serve 1.6 million customers in more than 140 countries. The Scale series offers up to 768 threads in dual-socket configuration. How will OVHcloud absorb these hardware spikes without raising prices for the new Strasbourg site?