Qarnot and the EIC Accelerator: A Green Cloud Sold in Receivership

Qarnot Computing, founded in 2010 and based in Montrouge near Paris, sells computing power from servers installed where their heat is useful. Its QBx "digital boiler" recovers about 95% of server heat as hot water at up to 65 °C for heating networks and swimming pools, in France, Finland and Greece. With the EIC, Qarnot said it aimed at "being the champion of the green cloud providers in Europe" and would "take an industrial turn", according to CORDIS.

The European Innovation Council granted €2,450,000 towards a €3.5 million project from May 2023 to April 2025. The final report describes new server integrations for the boiler, cheaper manufacturing and a rebuilt scheduler handling 700 cores per machine pool. Qarnot's revenue fell from €4.31 million in 2022 to €3.04 million in 2024 while its loss grew to €5.97 million. On 19 May 2026 the Nanterre commercial court opened receivership, and on 8 July it approved a sale plan and converted the case to judicial liquidation, according to the official gazette BODACC. Scaleway, the cloud arm of the iliad group, acquired the business.

What Happened to Qarnot

Qarnot announced a €35 million round in early 2023, with Banque des Territoires investing for the French state's France 2030 plan, but "this windfall did not allow the company to balance its accounts", Next reported, citing cumulative losses of €9 million in 2023 and 2024. The court set 18 May 2026 as the date its payments stopped. Scaleway announced the purchase on 10 July, describing Qarnot as a specialist in high-performance computing for engineering, simulation and research, with heat recovery deployed in places such as Brescia, Italy.

The Technology: Servers as Boilers

Each QBx holds 12 Open Compute Project servers cooled by liquid, and Qarnot's middleware, Qware, spreads cloud jobs across its scattered sites. The report claims Qarnot cuts carbon footprint by up to 80% compared with a regular European data centre because the electricity is used twice, for computing and heating, and no air conditioning is needed. It also says the team tested several storage and caching configurations, "most of which were unsatisfactory", and was still developing its own data registry.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The engineering work on the boiler and the software went ahead, though the report gives the scheduler at 700 cores per pool against a target of 1,500 "within a year". The business goal, to scale and become the leading green cloud provider in Europe, was not met on the public record: revenue shrank and the company entered receivership a year after the project closed. CORDIS still lists the project as signed.

1. Boiler hardwareDeliveredNew server integrations.
2. Scalable orchestrationPartly700 of 1,500 cores per pool.
3. Commercial scale-upNot metRevenue down 29%.
4. Independent companyEndedLiquidated, business sold.

The Money

According to Pappers, Qarnot lost €2.01 million in 2022, €3.1 million in 2023 and €5.97 million in 2024, while wage costs rose from €4.25 million to €6.06 million. Its cash fell from €13.2 million at the end of 2022 to €2.16 million at the end of 2024, when it also had €6.26 million of financial debt. Its equity fell from €16.7 million to €9.13 million.

What Cannot Be Checked

Why Europe Should Care

The technology survives inside a French cloud provider, which keeps it in European hands. But the EIC backed Qarnot to scale as an independent green cloud company, and just over a year after the project ended it could not pay its debts.

The Verdict

Qarnot's liquidator, Scaleway and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.