Alibaba Cloud Launches First Public Cloud Region in the Netherlands

• Two new data centres aim to bring robust infrastructure, lower latency and in-region data residency to local and European customers
• New AI and cloud products unveiled to meet the growing demand of enterprise AI in Europe

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – Media OutReach Newswire – 29 October 2026 – Alibaba Cloud, a leading global provider of AI infrastructure and the intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced the launch of its first public cloud region in the Netherlands, located in Amsterdam, with two new data centres now available to meet growing European demand for cloud and AI services. The announcement was made at the first International Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud's flagship technology event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"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. 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.

The launch reflects surging customer demand as European businesses scale cloud-native operations and integrate AI at scale. By establishing infrastructure locally, Alibaba Cloud can deliver more resilient, low-latency services, strengthen disaster recovery, and support customers who require their data to be processed and stored locally in Netherlands and within Europe.

The new region offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing products—spanning elastic computing, storage, container, networking, big data, security, database and cloud-native services. To meet the growing demand for enterprise agents across Europe, Alibaba Cloud also plans to bring a suite of agentic AI services to the region.

These products include ACS Agent Sandbox, which provides hardware-level security isolation while reducing the operational cost of AI agents; Agent Security Center, an integrated defense platform for AI agents; AI Security Guardrails 2.0, an upgraded security solution with end-to-end risk detection capabilities; Agentic SOC, an enterprise-grade, AI agent-driven security operations platform; and STAROps, a comprehensive intelligent operations platform. Together, these products are designed to streamline the building and running of enterprise-scale agents in a secure environment, giving enterprises full-cycle management of agent engineering.

During the conference, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled the latest generation of Apsara Stack, a flexible hybrid cloud solution built on public cloud architecture for public sector and enterprise AI workloads. The new solution delivers more than 80 cloud and AI products and provides round-the-clock service to customers worldwide. Powered by AI-driven operations and maintenance, it has improved operational accuracy to 92.5% and increased automation rates to 70%.

Apsara Stack offers a seamless hybrid cloud experience by bringing full-stack capabilities on premises. The platform combines flexible deployment and licensing with robust disaster recovery and enhanced security. This enables finance, telecom and public sector organizations to maintain controlled asset ownership and compliance while benefiting from agile cloud scalability.

Building a Robust Ecosystem with Customers and Partners to Thrive in the AI-powered Digital Era

As AI and cloud adoption accelerate, the new Netherlands region enhances Alibaba Cloud's ability to deliver AI-ready infrastructure to European businesses—improving resilience, reducing latency, strengthening data localisation and supporting broader digital transformation goals. A growing ecosystem of Netherlands-based innovators is already building on Alibaba Cloud's advanced and secure cloud and AI technologies.

• JetBrains, a software development company is working with Alibaba Cloud to explore the integration of Qwen models to power Junie, JetBrains AI coding assistant, across both cloud and local scenarios. The collaboration gives JetBrains and its developers strong cost-to-performance, early access to frontier Qwen models, and the flexibility to choose where models run — from in-region cloud to fully local, on-device setups.

"AI development is moving quickly, and developers need the freedom to choose the tools and models that work best for them. 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," said Kirill Skrygan, CEO of JetBrains.

• Netherlands-based LLM platform orq.ai has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to integrate Qwen models into its hosted model garden, served natively from Alibaba Cloud's AI development platform Model Studio. This integration allows orq.ai's customers to access diversified cutting-edge generative AI while maintaining strict EU data localisation.

"For us at orq.ai, the value of local infrastructure is what businesses can build on it. We welcome Alibaba's investment in the Netherlands and look forward to working together to help more organisations put AI into everyday use in a reliable and scalable way," said Anthony Diaz, Co-Founder and CPTO, orq.ai.

• Monks, a global digital-first marketing and technology services company headquartered in Amsterdam is integrating Alibaba's latest generative AI models into Monks.Flow, its proprietary end-to-end AI marketing platform through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio platform. By leveraging Alibaba Cloud's advanced AI capabilities, Monks can deliver highly ambitious creative assets faster, providing global brands with greater speed-to-market and flexible token optionality. The companies plan to expand the use of these models beyond content creation into wider marketing workflows, with Monks adopting Alibaba latest AI models in the future.

"AI moves fast. Our job is to turn that progress into a creative and commercial advantage for our clients, and to provide flexibility and optionality in their token usage. Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud will give our teams access to its latest image, video and language models for use in Monks.Flow, helping us bring more ambitious ideas to life and get great work into market faster," said Wesley ter Haar, Co-Founder of Monks and Chief AI Officer.

• Magnific, the world's leading AI platform for creatives serving more than one million subscribers and thousands of enterprise clients worldwide, has integrated Alibaba's advanced AI models into its platform to help content creators generate, enhance, and refine content more efficiently, while unlocking new levels of creativity and productivity.

"We are pleased to partner with Alibaba and integrate its advanced AI models into Magnific. This collaboration strengthens our platform and gives creators more powerful tools to accelerate their work and expand their creative possibilities," said Jose Florido, CGO from Magnific.

• Idea.ai, an Amsterdam-based digital design marketplace, has leveraged Alibaba's advanced AI models to power its next generation of generative media inside idea.ai, delivering high-quality, cost-competitive creative tools to its tens of millions of registered users. The two companies plan to deepen their collaboration across the full creative spectrum.

"We are committed to making great creative tools accessible to everyone, and Alibaba Cloud's advanced AI models help us deliver that at scale cost-effectively. This is just the start; we're excited to deepen the collaboration across the whole creative industry," said Roemie Hillenaar, CEO and Co-founder, Idea.ai.

Alibaba Cloud's Growing Presence Across Europe

As part of Alibaba's previously announced US$53 billion investment in AI and cloud infrastructure, the new Netherlands region expands Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure to 109 availability zones across 32 regions worldwide, providing secure, scalable and robust cloud and AI infrastructure to support customers everywhere on their digital innovation journeys.

Joining Alibaba Cloud's existing European regions in Germany (Frankfurt), the UK (London) and France (Paris), the Netherlands becomes the company's fourth region in Europe, giving businesses more in-region options for data residency and keeping their data and AI workloads within Europe.

In addition, Alibaba Cloud is also planning to establish its first cloud regions in Finland, while expanding its data center footprints in Germany and France over the next 12 months. The expansion will further increase Alibaba Cloud's global computing capacity and strengthen its ability to provide localized cloud and AI services to customers across key European markets.

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About Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is a global leader in full-stack AI+Cloud solutions. It offers a comprehensive suite of flexible, scalable and secure cloud services built on a three-tiered architecture of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). Alibaba Cloud empowers enterprises worldwide with its full-stack AI capabilities, powered by Qwen (Chinese: Qianwen), a family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba. Debuted in 2023, Qwen models are available to global developers via HuggingFace (open-weight) or through API on Model Studio, Alibaba's one-stop, enterprise-grade AI development platform offering access to the full suite of Qwen foundation models.


News Source: Alibaba Cloud