Henryk Klaba is the father of Octave Klaba, who founded OVH in Roubaix, in northern France, in November 1999. He engineered the water-cooling system used in OVH data centres.
Water cooling mattered to the business model. OVH built its own servers and later its own cooling, which let it sell hosting cheaply and undercut American cloud providers.
The Klaba family came from Poland. Octave arrived in Roubaix as a teenager speaking no French.
OVH went public on Euronext Paris in October 2021. In 2024 it had revenue of €993.1 million. The Klaba family held about 81% of its shares.