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Alibaba Cloud is pushing ahead with its plans for European expansion, launching its first public cloud region in the Netherlands with two new data centers in Amsterdam.
The Chinese firm said the move will help it deliver more resilient, low-latency services, strengthen disaster recovery, and support customers who require their data to be processed and stored locally in the Netherlands and within Europe.
“The Netherlands is one of Europe’s most vibrant digital economies, and our first region here is a direct response to the strong demand we see from local businesses building and scaling with AI,” said Feifei Li, chief technology officer and president of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“By bringing our advanced AI and cloud capabilities to Amsterdam, we are giving customers the in-region infrastructure, performance and data residency they need to innovate faster, scale securely and operate with greater efficiency in the AI era.”
The firm plans to offer a suite of cloud computing products spanning elastic computing, storage, containers, networking, big data, security, database, and cloud native services.
It also plans to bring a suite of agentic AI services to the region. These include ACS Agent Sandbox, which provides hardware-level security isolation while reducing the operational cost of AI agents.
Elsewhere, the firm is rolling out its Agent Security Center, an integrated defense platform for AI agents, and AI Security Guardrails 2.0, an upgraded security solution with end-to-end risk detection capabilities.
Agentic SOC, meanwhile, is an enterprise-grade, AI agent-driven security operations platform, while STAROps is an intelligent operations platform.
The company also launched the latest generation of Apsara Stack, a flexible hybrid cloud solution built on public cloud architecture for public sector and enterprise AI workloads.
This, the company said, will deliver more than 80 cloud and AI products, with round-the-clock service to customers worldwide.
Alibaba Cloud’s growing European footprint
The company already has some customers in the Netherlands, including software development company JetBrains, which is looking at integrating Qwen models to power Junie, JetBrains’ AI coding assistant, across both cloud and local scenarios.
“AI development is moving quickly, and developers need the freedom to choose the tools and models that work best for them,” said Kirill Skrygan, CEO of JetBrains.
“Working with Alibaba Cloud gives us an opportunity to combine JetBrains’ expertise in software development and AI with Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure and AI capabilities, giving developers more choice while keeping them in control of how they build with AI.”
Alibaba Cloud now has 109 availability zones across 32 regions worldwide. The firm recently launched its first cloud regions in Türkiye and Finland alongside existing regions in Frankfurt, London, and Paris.
It’s also increased its data center footprint in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong. By 2032, the company said it’s aiming for a total global data center capacity of more than 20GW.
