[Digital Today reporter Choi Jae-won (최재원)] China’s Alibaba Cloud is stepping up its push into Europe by opening its first public cloud region in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The move aims to meet local companies’ demand for data storage and the expansion of AI services.

Fintech News Switzerland reported that Alibaba Cloud announced the new cloud region and the start of operations at two data centres at the International Apsara Conference in Amsterdam. The Netherlands is its fourth European region after Frankfurt in Germany, London in Britain and Paris in France.

The new hub focuses on supporting local storage and processing of data for European companies and reducing network latency. It will also strengthen disaster recovery capabilities while offering a range of cloud services, including computing, storage, networking, databases, security and big data.

It will also introduce enterprise AI agent services in stages. These include the ACS Agent Sandbox, which isolates AI agent execution environments at the hardware level, and the Agent Security Center, which responds to security threats. It also plans to introduce AI Security Guardrails 2.0, an AI-powered security operations platform called Agentic SOC, and an intelligent operations management service called STAROps.

At the event, it also unveiled the latest version of Apsara Stack, a hybrid cloud platform for companies and public institutions. It supports deploying more than 80 cloud and AI products in a company’s own IT facilities. Key targets are the finance, telecommunications and public sectors, where security and regulatory compliance are important.

The expansion is part of Alibaba’s previously announced $53 billion AI and cloud infrastructure investment plan. Alibaba Cloud’s global infrastructure has expanded to 32 regions and 109 availability zones.

Alibaba Cloud plans to build its first cloud region in Finland within the next 12 months and expand data centres in Germany and France. The strategy is to absorb demand for data localisation in Europe while strengthening its capacity to supply AI infrastructure.