Alibaba Cloud has launched its first public cloud region in the Netherlands, bringing two data centres online in Amsterdam to meet growing demand for cloud computing and AI services across Europe.
The company announced the launch during its first International Apsara Conference in Amsterdam.
The Netherlands becomes Alibaba Cloud’s fourth European region, joining its existing operations in Frankfurt, London and Paris.
Alibaba Cloud said the new infrastructure would help reduce latency, strengthen disaster recovery capabilities and support businesses that need to process and store data locally in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe.
The expansion forms part of Alibaba’s previously announced US$53 billion investment in AI and cloud infrastructure. It brings the company’s global network to 109 availability zones across 32 regions.
“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,”
said Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer and President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Alibaba Cloud plans to introduce agentic AI services
The Amsterdam region offers cloud computing services covering elastic computing, storage, containers, networking, big data, security, databases and cloud-native applications.
Alibaba Cloud also plans to introduce several agentic AI services to help enterprises develop, deploy and manage AI agents.
These include ACS Agent Sandbox, which provides hardware-level security isolation for AI agents, and Agent Security Center, a platform designed to protect AI agent operations.
Other planned offerings include AI Security Guardrails 2.0 for risk detection, Agentic SOC for AI-driven security operations and STAROps for intelligent operations management.
The company said these services aim to simplify the development and management of enterprise AI agents while addressing security and operational requirements.
Alibaba Cloud introduces updated Apsara Stack
At the same conference, Alibaba Cloud unveiled the latest generation of Apsara Stack, its hybrid cloud solution designed for enterprise and public sector AI workloads.
The platform brings more than 80 cloud and AI products to on-premises environments and provides round-the-clock support.
It combines flexible deployment and licensing options with disaster recovery and security capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud is targeting financial institutions, telecommunications providers and public sector organisations that need to maintain control over their infrastructure while meeting compliance requirements.
Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud plans to establish its first cloud region in Finland and expand its data centre presence in Germany and France over the next 12 months.
The company said the expansion would increase its computing capacity and support demand for locally hosted cloud and AI services across Europe.
Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by Alibaba Cloud
