OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne) [edit: this is WRONG, confused with Scaleway and Klaba's past affiliation with 42].
Hetzner is a smaller VPS and colo in Germany, but provides a better experience for hobbyists.
HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise oriented experience, but a number of government and industry critical apps in France are actually hosted on OVH.
In Germany, the bigger providers are either whitelabeling AWS (eg. Deustche Telekom) or implementing a chimera of GCP, Azure, and existing colos (eg. Schwarz's STACKIT).
I personally think the French approach to tech sovereignity is a much more realistic approach than the German method - French industries, financiers, entrepreneurs, and government agencies are actually aligned with building their own ecosystem, such as the effort put into LaSuite plus actually putting effort to host in OVH and Scaleway, and the fact that people like Xavier Niel actually exist, whereas the German equivalent would move to London or the US. Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France, but I haven't seen a similar thing in Germany.
>Even French-turned-American tech companies like Datadog have tried to maintain a presence in France
While started by two French founders, Datadog was always an American company. It was only post IPO they started hiring in France (for more than local sales roles).
