Alibaba Cloud set to open new data centres in Europe next year as overseas push speeds up

The tech giant is set to add extra capacity to help international clients deploy real-world artificial intelligence

Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud business unit, is set to launch data centres in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, speeding up an overseas push as it seeks to win enterprise customers through its “full stack AI capabilities” spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and multimodal models.

The first of these new data centres will open in the Netherlands in October. The cloud unit will also add to existing data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong, said Li Feifei, the CTO and president of international business at Alibaba Cloud, at the company’s Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, which runs through Thursday.

“We are expanding our global cloud footprint to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners,” Li said, adding that companies were moving AI from experiments into real-world deployment.

The company also announced partnerships with firms including Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Indonesian logistics group Lion Parcel, Malaysia’s Loomi Entertainment and business software provider Shake.