Snowflake Achieves HDS Certification in France, Helping Healthcare Organizations Accelerate Data and AI Innovation

Snowflake Achieves HDS Certification in France, Helping Healthcare Organizations Accelerate Data and AI Innovation

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JUL 01, 2026 / 6 min read Healthcare & Life Sciences Snowflake Achieves HDS Certification in France, Helping Healthcare Organizations Accelerate Data and AI Innovation

Alistair Hankin +1

For healthcare organizations in France, data innovation and regulatory compliance have long pulled in opposite directions. Strict requirements governing the hosting of health data have made it difficult to consolidate clinical, research and operational data on modern cloud infrastructure. Today, that changes.

Snowflake has achieved Hébergeur de Données de Santé (HDS) Certification Version 2, covering health data workloads running on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

This milestone represents an important step in Snowflake's continued investment in highly regulated industries and helps healthcare and life sciences organizations in France use the Snowflake AI Data Cloud for eligible workloads that require health data hosting capabilities.

"Healthcare and life sciences organizations across France are increasingly turning to data and AI to accelerate innovation, improve patient outcomes and drive operational excellence. Many of France's leading healthcare and life sciences organizations already use Snowflake as part of their data strategy. Achieving HDS certification reinforces our long-term commitment to supporting this ecosystem with the trusted foundation organizations need to securely collaborate, innovate and realize the full value of their data in a highly regulated environment."

—Arnaud Chiffert, Country Manager, France, Snowflake

Supporting France's healthcare and life sciences ecosystem

France is home to one of Europe's leading healthcare and life sciences sectors, spanning healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, research institutions and a rapidly growing digital health ecosystem.

Across these organizations, data has become critical to advancing clinical research, improving care delivery, strengthening population health initiatives, combating fraud, enabling secure collaboration and supporting the next generation of AI-powered applications.

Yet many organizations continue to face challenges bringing together data across fragmented systems while maintaining the governance, security and compliance requirements associated with sensitive health information.

HDS certification helps address an important part of this challenge by providing a framework specifically designed for health data hosting in France.

What Snowflake's HDS certification covers

Snowflake's HDS certification applies to the management system supporting the information security of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and supporting processes.

The certified scope includes:

Physical sites hosting the hardware infrastructure used to process health data

Hardware infrastructure used to process health data

Platforms hosting information system applications

Virtual infrastructure used to process health data

The certification supports eligible healthcare workloads deployed on Snowflake regions in the European Economic Area (EEA).

Looking beyond France

HDS is a French-specific standard, but the compliance challenges it addresses are part of a broader European shift.

As the European Health Data Space (EHDS) initiative advances, healthcare organizations are seeking trusted data foundations that support secure collaboration, interoperability and governance across healthcare ecosystems. Snowflake's HDS certification represents another step in helping organizations build with confidence in highly regulated environments, supporting healthcare organizations as they prepare for a more connected and data-driven future.

For healthcare providers, life sciences organizations, health insurers and digital health innovators operating across Europe, the ability to securely collaborate on data while maintaining organizational governance controls will be important for accelerating research, improving patient outcomes and driving innovation.

Innovation already underway

Across the sector, organizations are already using Snowflake to transform how they collaborate on data, accelerate research and bring AI closer to the point of decision-making.

In France, Sanofi is using Snowflake to reinvent how it operates, from R&D to manufacturing to commercial. Its research teams use Snowflake to process real-world clinical data at scale, accelerating the analysis behind drug development decisions. HDS certification strengthens Snowflake's ability to support workloads like these across France's healthcare ecosystem.

Globally, organizations such as Roche , Pfizer , NHS in the UK, Siemens Healthineers and Bupa are using Snowflake to support scientific research, healthcare innovation, secure data collaboration and data-driven decision-making across increasingly complex healthcare ecosystems, supporting initiatives aimed at improving care delivery, access to insights and healthcare innovation.

These examples reflect a broader industry shift toward trusted, governed data foundations that can support advanced analytics, secure collaboration and AI innovation at scale.

New opportunities for data collaboration and AI

Healthcare innovation depends on the ability to securely connect and collaborate on data across organizations.

Healthcare providers are seeking to create more connected patient experiences and improve operational performance. Life sciences organizations are accelerating clinical research and real-world evidence initiatives. Health insurers are investing in advanced analytics to improve claims processing, fraud detection and member services. Digital health innovators are building new applications powered by data and AI.

Snowflake helps organizations securely collaborate on governed data, giving teams the insights they need while maintaining control and governance.

These capabilities support a wide range of use cases across the sector, including:

Clinical and research data collaboration

Real-world evidence and outcomes research

Population health analytics

Healthcare AI and machine learning initiatives

Health insurance analytics and fraud detection

Secure data sharing across healthcare ecosystems

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