Alibaba Cloud has opened its first Dutch public cloud region in Amsterdam. It consists of two data centers and is available immediately. This makes the Netherlands the company’s fourth European region. At the same time, Alibaba is introducing a range of agentic AI services and a new generation of Apsara Stack.
Alibaba made the announcement at the first International Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud’s flagship technology event, taking place in Amsterdam this year. The new region joins the existing European locations in Frankfurt, London, and Paris. The latter launched in June as the third European hub and features two availability zones.
With the Amsterdam data centers, Alibaba is targeting companies that want their data processed and stored in the Netherlands or within Europe. The company cites lower latency and better disaster recovery as additional benefits. “Our first region here is a direct response to the strong demand we’re seeing from local companies building and scaling with AI,” says Feifei Li, CTO and President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Agents take center stage
The region offers the standard suite of services: elastic computing, storage, containers, networking, big data, security, databases, and cloud-native services. But the focus is on AI agents. Alibaba is bringing five agentic services to the region. ACS Agent Sandbox provides hardware-level isolation, Agent Security Center is a platform for agents, and AI Security Guardrails 2.0 adds end-to-end risk detection. It also includes Agentic SOC for security operations and STAROps for intelligent operations.
Apsara Stack also received an update. This hybrid cloud solution brings more than 80 cloud and AI products on-premises, designed for the financial sector, telecommunications, and the public sector. Thanks to AI-driven management, operational accuracy has reportedly risen to 92.5 percent, and the automation rate to 70 percent.
Dutch customers are adopting Qwen
Alibaba is showcasing a handful of Dutch partners. JetBrains is exploring the integration of Qwen models into Junie, its AI coding assistant. Developers can then choose whether models run in the regional cloud or entirely on-premises. The Dutch LLM platform orq.ai is incorporating Qwen models into its model garden via Model Studio, ensuring that data remains within the EU. Monks is integrating Alibaba models into its marketing platform, Monks.Flow. Magnific and Amsterdam-based Idea.ai are also using the models for creative tools.
The Dutch region is part of the previously announced $53 billion investment in AI and cloud infrastructure. This brings Alibaba’s global total to 109 availability zones across 32 regions. Alibaba plans to add its first region in Finland within twelve months and is also expanding capacity in Germany and France.
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