The Alibaba Cloud Netherlands region went live in Amsterdam with two data centers, the company's first public cloud region in the country. Alibaba Cloud opened it during its first International Apsara Conference, held in Amsterdam. Feifei Li, its chief technology officer and president of international business, described the region as a response to Dutch companies building with AI who want infrastructure and data residency close by.
The Alibaba Cloud Netherlands region opens with elastic computing, storage, containers, networking, big data, security, databases and cloud-native services. Agent tooling is a separate, later step. Alibaba Cloud plans to bring ACS Agent Sandbox, Agent Security Center, AI Security Guardrails 2.0, Agentic SOC and STAROps to Amsterdam, and gave no date. The sandbox provides hardware-level security isolation for AI agents.
A new generation of Apsara Stack, the hybrid cloud for public sector and enterprise AI workloads, also debuted at the conference, per Alibaba Cloud. It spans more than 80 cloud and AI products. The company reports that AI-driven operations raised Apsara Stack's operational accuracy to 92.5% and its automation rate to 70%. Alibaba Cloud says running it on premises lets finance, telecom and public sector organizations keep control of asset ownership and compliance.
The Alibaba Cloud Netherlands region is the company's fourth in Europe, after Frankfurt, London and Paris. Going by Alibaba Cloud's region list, Amsterdam has two availability zones, the same as London and Paris and one fewer than Frankfurt. Added up, that puts the company's European footprint at nine zones across four regions, inside a global network of 109 zones in 32 regions.
| European region | Availability zones | Released |
|---|---|---|
| Germany (Frankfurt) | 3 | 2016 |
| UK (London) | 2 | 2018 |
| France (Paris) | 2 | 2026 |
| Netherlands (Amsterdam) | 2 | 2026 |
Several customers and partners were named at the Alibaba Cloud Netherlands region's launch. JetBrains is exploring Qwen models for Junie, its AI coding assistant, in both cloud and local setups. The Dutch LLM platform orq.ai has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to offer Qwen models in its hosted model garden, served from Model Studio, which Alibaba Cloud says maintains EU data localization. Monks, Magnific and Idea.ai are also building Alibaba's models into creative and marketing tools.
Alibaba Cloud also plans its first cloud regions in Finland and intends to expand its data center footprints in Germany and France over the next 12 months.
