The alliance between Thales, Europe's largest defence electronics supplier, and Alphabet's search unit Google fulfils a May government plan under which France acknowledged US technological superiority in the field.
The French government said then that cloud-computing services developed by Google and Microsoft could be used to store France's most sensitive state and corporate data, provided the services were licensed to French companies.
In their joint statement, Thales and Google Cloud said they will create a new France-based company – as yet unnamed (Thoogle, perhaps?) – in which Thales will be the majority shareholder.
That company will provide the whole range of Google Cloud's services, but its network and servers would be separate from those used for regular Google clients.
"The company is going to run Google software on its infrastructure with layers of security to ensure cyber security and protection of data from extra-territorial...