Alibaba is launching its first public cloud region in the Netherlands, with two new data centres in Amsterdam. The new infrastructure is meant to meet growing European demand for AI and cloud services.
Alibaba will soon open a cloud region in the Netherlands, hosted from data centres in Amsterdam. The cloud region will have two ‘availability zones’ to absorb the outage of one zone. With this expansion, the Netherlands becomes the fourth European region where Alibaba is active, alongside existing locations in Germany, the United Kingdom and France.
The Chinese cloud provider does not want to stop at the Netherlands. Alibaba is setting aside 53 billion dollars to expand its global infrastructure. Until last year, Alibaba had only one cloud region on the European mainland, in Germany (and in London since 2018). This year, Paris and Amsterdam were added, but Alibaba also has Finland in its sights. Belgium is not on the roadmap for now.
Chinese cloud giant
Although Alibaba is mainly known in Europe for its web shop, where you can buy environmentally unfriendly products of equally low quality at low prices, the company is no small player in the global cloud industry. With four percent, it has the same market share as Oracle. It earns that market share mainly in China and Asia.
Alibaba hopes to score worldwide with Qwen. The company’s AI models perform no worse on benchmarks than the best models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Qwen 3 is the most recent version. Unlike Chinese cloud services, which European companies tend to view with scepticism, Chinese AI models seem to carry fewer taboos, because they often turn out cheaper than their American counterparts.
European expansion
The Chinese cloud giant wants to use Amsterdam as the starting point for further expansion in Europe. It even organised a conference in Amsterdam to officially open the cloud region and to let Dutch customers talk about what they do with Qwen. Alibaba hopes to tie in local partners, who in turn draw their customers to the cloud.
The question is whether the European cloud landscape is now ready to welcome a major player from China. Sovereignty is high on the agenda, and companies are trying to reduce their dependence on non-European players to promote local alternatives. In that context, Alibaba can hardly be called a sovereign choice.