Infomaniak, the cloud on a human scale

A pioneer in ethical and sovereign cloud computing, the Geneva-based startup Infomaniak made a remarkable debut on the SIX Swiss Exchange on 1 October. A report from the company’s offices.

Boris Siegenthaler welcomes us in flip-flops, brown shorts and a white T-shirt. The founder of Infomaniak is not one for the media spotlight – neither in his presentation nor in his choice of words. “Speeches aren’t really my thing,” he says with a smile, almost apologetically. But the Geneva-based cloud provider’s stock market debut on 1 October has forced him out of his shell to talk to journalists. And he has obliged. It may not be his natural habitat, but he speaks with conviction, carried by his message – passionate, almost activist-like. “Technology only makes sense if it improves lives and respects our planet,” declares Boris Siegenthaler.

Like the finest Silicon Valley stories, Infomaniak’s adventure began in a shed where a handful of geeks would gather. But this one wasn’t in California; it was at the bottom of a garden in Bellevue, on the outskirts of Geneva. It was the early 1990s: Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison, Germany was reunifying, and Stefan Eicher released his landmark album, Engelberg, in 1991. So much for current events – the enthusiasts at the Bellevue computer club had eyes only for the cathode-ray tubes of their computer monitors. In 1994, two of them – Boris Siegenthaler and Fabian Lucchi – opened a small computer shop in Châtelaine, called Siegenthaler & Lucchi, Infomaniak. It was a success. But the real turning point came with the discovery of the internet – a revelation. In 1999, the two partners changed the company’s name and Infomaniak Network SA was born. The company quickly focused on website hosting; by 2003, it was hosting over 3,000 websites and had become the leading web hosting provider in French-speaking Switzerland.

Nearly 25 years later, Infomaniak’s premises bear little resemblance to the small shop in Châtelaine. At the company’s headquarters in Geneva’s Acacias district, a statue of the Incredible Hulk greets visitors, all bulging green muscles. While the offices look like any other open-plan workspace, the meeting rooms each have their own distinct atmosphere. Here, a room decorated like the White House Oval Office; there, a ‘grandma’s living room’; and further along, the ‘cat room’ and an American-style diner. “All the rooms are decorated by our staff and myself,” says Boris Siegenthaler. Infomaniak currently employs 330 staff, all based in Switzerland – a workforce that has nearly tripled since 2019, prompting the company to expand into other floors of the building it occupies. As you move from floor to floor, more superhero statues and figurines appear, creating a labyrinthine atmosphere that blends traditional offices with spaces that straddle the line between the worlds of fantasy and geek culture.

Enough about the decor. On the management front, Boris Siegenthaler, Infomaniak’s storied CEO for 26 years, handed over the reins of the company to Marc Oehler in December 2020 to become Chief Strategy Officer. This marks a change while maintaining continuity, as Marc Oehler started out in Infomaniak’s IT support team in 2003.

In terms of figures, the company made a spectacular market debut on 1 October. From an opening price of 56 Swiss francs, the share price climbed as high as 140 francs, before finally closing its first day of trading at 85 francs. “We’ve surpassed a valuation of 300 million francs, a figure higher than the projected range,” says Marc Oehler, Infomaniak’s CEO. “It’s now up to the market to determine the course of our stock market performance.” And given the company’s robust growth, the future could well prove him right.

stood at 54.2 million francs – a 13.8% increase on the previous year – with EBITDA of 19.9 million, up 14.2% year-on-year. While all business segments are growing, the sovereign cloud market is driving the company’s results. “Five years ago, the sovereign cloud was still a niche market; today it is a necessity,” says Marc Oehler. A necessity that has been in the company’s DNA since its inception.

“Everything that’s happening right now – the growing awareness of the importance of digital sovereignty and the environmental D O S S I E R issues surrounding data centres – I saw coming. I simply thought it would happen faster. But the fact that we started in the 2000s is now an advantage. While all our competitors are trying to position themselves in the sovereign cloud, we’ve been doing it for a long time,” points out Boris Siegenthaler. “All our employees work in Switzerland, our data centres are in Switzerland and our software is developed in Switzerland. Of course, it would be more cost-effective to hire developers abroad, but we are committed to this local presence, which enables us to ensure end-to-end sovereignty.”

The company markets a total of around 50 products, including its artificial intelligence platform Euria; its office suite kSuite, an alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace; and SwissTransfer, a competitor to services like WeTransfer. Its clients include, for example, RTBF, the French-speaking Belgian public broadcaster, which called on Infomaniak to broadcast live matches from the last football World Cup. Others include Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), whose website is hosted by Infomaniak, the TV channel Léman Bleu, and the radio stations NRJ and France Info.

In total, Infomaniak currently has over 300,000 paying customers. Overall, 33.5% of its net revenue was generated outside Switzerland in 2025 – with France accounting for 21.9%, followed by Belgium (4.3%), Germany and Italy. “Our 10 largest clients account for less than 2% of our revenue. This means that if one of them were to leave us, the impact on our results would be limited,” explains Céline Morey, Infomaniak’s CFO. “And free accounts represent a significant customer base.” Indeed, following the example of Apple and Google, free services such as email accounts, limited data storage or data transfer (SwissTransfer) often serve as a gateway to paid products.

But why choose the Geneva- based company over the services of an American giant? “Customers choose to migrate to Infomaniak mainly for three reasons: cost, performance and, above all, sovereignty,” says Marc Oehler. “According to a study by Gartner, more than 75% of companies based outside the United States will implement a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030.”

To ensure the long-term preservation of this digital sovereignty and Swiss identity, on 13 May 2026 Boris Siegenthaler transferred the majority of the company’s voting rights to a Swiss public-interest foundation: the Infomaniak Foundation. The foundation now holds the majority of voting rights in the form of special shares. Without the foundation’s approval, the company can never fall into foreign hands or be at the mercy of investors who might wish to alter its DNA. “Thousands of individuals, businesses and institutions entrust us with their most sensitive data every day. We owed it to them to guarantee its long-term security,” explains Boris Siegenthaler.

But for the founder, sovereignty is not the only battle. “Technology must also be ethical and environmentally friendly,” he continues, “which is why we are building data centres on a human scale, keeping their environmental impact as low as possible.” To see this for ourselves, we head to the La Chapelle-Les Sciers neighbourhood in Plan-les-Ouates (GE), where brand-new buildings form the ‘eco-responsible and participatory’ La Bistoquette cooperative. Walking through the streets, it’s hard to imagine that a data centre is operating at full capacity nearby. That’s because this centre, known as D4, lies beneath our feet, in the space that could have been the residential complex’s car park. Invisible.

Opened in January 2025, D4 is the newest of Infomaniak’s four data centres. Also in shorts, Julien Bonnat, head of datacentre at Infomaniak, shows us around. “Every door leading to the servers has access control. Most of them require two-factor authentication: facial recognition and fingerprint scanning. And all the centre’s equipment is protected by an alarm system,” he says, as he ushers us into this ultra-secure facility. 

Spanning 1,800 m² – equivalent to four basketball courts – the D4 facility houses nearly 6,000 servers. It is expected to accommodate 10,000 by 2028, when it reaches full capacity. By comparison, Meta’s Prometheus data centre, which began operations in 2026 in Ohio, will cover 350,000 m² when fully completed. Inside D4, rows of racks hum quietly and flash continuously. A minor setback for sovereignty: the servers are fitted with B300 GPUs from US company Nvidia, but no European manufacturer is capable of supplying equivalent hardware. Next to these computing powerhouses, it’s hot. Very hot. Between 30°C and 45°C depending on the location, which, in hindsight, fully justifies our hosts’ flip-flops and shorts.

Unobtrusive on the surface, D4 also aims to be environmentally discreet. The electricity powering it is 100% renewable. Across the group, nearly 30% of electricity needs are met by solar power. Furthermore, “unlike the vast majority of data centres around the world, we do not use air conditioning,” continues Julien Bonnat. “The servers are cooled by airflow.”

The engineer points to the raised floor through which the cold airflow enters – though the thermometer still reads almost 30°C. After passing through the servers, the hot air (40°C to 45°C) is recirculated and then passes through a heat exchanger to transfer its heat to a water circuit. The cooled air is then returned to the servers, while heat pumps raise the water temperature to 82°C – depending on demand – before feeding it into the district heating network operated by Services Industriels de Genève (SIG). So, no air conditioning. No water-consuming cooling towers. No energy released into the atmosphere. On the contrary: “Thanks to our data centre, the heat is not wasted. At full capacity, it will provide heating for the equivalent of 6,000 highly insulated homes,” says Julien Bonnat proudly.

But if it is possible to run data centres without air conditioning, why don’t all industry players adopt a similar strategy? “A lack of courage,” replies Boris Siegenthaler. “Conventional data centres blow 20°C air onto their servers. But sending air at 30°C makes no difference, as the processors operate between 60°C and 85°C. You simply need to circulate the air more quickly if it’s warmer. Our data centres have thus been operating without air conditioning since 2013.” 

Infomaniak prides itself on having handled the entire design of the data centre in-house. Better still, the company hopes to inspire others to follow suit. “Rather than keeping this expertise to ourselves, we’ve made it open source: all the technical documentation is available on d4project.org,” explains Boris Siegenthaler. “Our aim is for this model to be replicated and adopted wherever possible.”

Against this backdrop, Infomaniak is observing from a distance the growing backlash against data centres in the United States, driven in particular by their phenomenal electricity consumption. “Our approach should limit opposition to the construction of our future data centres,” says Thomas Jacobsen, a spokesperson for the company. “In fact, far from opposing us, several local authorities have reached out because we can contribute to their district heating networks.”