Alibaba Cloud to Open First Cloud Regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands

Alibaba Cloud will build its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, the company said at its annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on Wednesday. The Chinese cloud provider also plans to expand its data-center footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong.

First regions in three countries

The three locations will be Alibaba Cloud's first full cloud regions in each of those countries. The company's European infrastructure has so far been built around Germany and the UK, with France added in June 2026 as its third European hub. Announcing the plan, Feifei Li, chief technology officer and president of international business at Alibaba Cloud, said AI is "moving rapidly from experimentation to real-world deployment, creating demand for both scalable infrastructure and more accessible AI capabilities."

Chip, capacity and spending

The regional plan followed the unveiling of the company's most powerful AI chip to date. T-Head, Alibaba's chip design unit, presented the Zhenwu V900 accelerator at the same conference, saying it delivers three times the performance of its predecessor and can scale to clusters of up to 500,000 units, with mass production planned for the first quarter of 2027. Chief executive Eddie Wu has said Alibaba aims to operate more than 20 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2032, and the group has committed more than $53 billion over three years to AI and cloud infrastructure.

Why it matters

Demand for locally hosted infrastructure is rising in Europe and the Middle East, where regulators are placing growing emphasis on data sovereignty. Alibaba Cloud competes in the region with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, all of which are also adding capacity. The new regions give customers in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands the option of keeping data and workloads inside their own countries. Bloomberg framed the move as an acceleration of the company's push into Europe and the Middle East, amid escalating US-China competition in AI chips and models.