“You might have a very good business, but if you choose a cloud provider that says ’okay it’s a good business you are doing and I can do this same business on my own,’ maybe it’s not the best choice for you,” Klaba said in a keynote at Data Centre World in London.

“If your cloud provider can be, in the future, your competitor, what are the choices you have to make today? OVH’s business is cloud. We will never do anything else except cloud, and we will never be in competition with you, with the business that you are doing.

“That’s not always the case with [service] providers in the world, and you see every day, every month, the new announcement of the cloud providers, the big giants of the Internet, that they are just going and going after your business.”

Concerns about funding a competitor are thought to be the reason for US retailer Target recently shifting away from Amazon Web Services, after Amazon acquired grocery chain Whole Foods, and why Walmart made considerable efforts to diversify its cloud portfolio.

Klaba also noted that “OVH is the only European company that provides cloud services on the global scale,” adding, “we just invested $1.5bn in infrastructure - 300,000 servers deployed, 27 data centers across 12 locations on three continents, 13Tbps of network capacity, 32 PoPs.

“It’s a lot of responsibility in the choice of the cloud provider, we believe we can be an alternative cloud on the market,” he said.