Alibaba Cloud plans to open regions in Finland and the Netherlands and strengthen its presence in France and Germany. Behind these announcements, the Chinese group is building an offer that combines data centers, chips and artificial intelligence models.
In Hangzhou, during its Apsara conference, Alibaba added three new regions to its international roadmap: Finland, the Netherlands and Turkey, with an opening announced in the next twelve months. The group also plans to expand its facilities in France, Germany, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. Turkey belongs to this international expansion, without being an establishment in the European Union.
In France, Alibaba is not starting from scratch. Its cloud region opened in June 2026 includes two availability zones. It adds to infrastructures already present in Germany and the United Kingdom. The group is today announcing an expansion of its French footprint, but is not detailing the additional capacity or the services that will be deployed there.
From chips to models, Alibaba wants to hold the whole chain
The issue goes beyond digital real estate; for Alibaba, it is about designing its AI accelerators, operating the centers that host them, developing Qwen models and selling companies the tools necessary to use them. This continuity potentially simplifies the transition to production, and also gives the supplier a deeper place in its customer’s systems.
The group presented the Zhenwu V900, an accelerator intended for training and inference, whose mass production and marketing is announced for the first quarter of 2027. Qwen 4 is being trained; models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters correspond to later versions being considered by Alibaba.
Mistral AI, for its part, seeks to combine models, computing capacity and business services. Verda wants to go beyond simple GPU rental to build an AI cloud platform. If the means, technologies and markets of these players differ, their common bet is more understandable: when a model can be compared or replaced, the ability to operate it reliably, close to the customer and within their constraints itself becomes a product.
Twenty gigawatts, but where and for which customers?
Alibaba gives this strategy a spectacular horizon, surpassing 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity operated by 2032. I
Behind this figure we must see chips, buildings, networks, cooling, electrical connections and customers capable of sustainably paying for their use. The AI campus project in Fouju, in Seine-et-Marne, already shows that computing projects are getting closer, in terms of their power and land requirements, to large industrial infrastructures.
A server in Europe does not solve all control issues
For a client, choosing a French or Dutch region can meet very concrete needs: proximity to users, availability of service, localization of certain data and organization of business recovery. But geography only describes part of the relationship and does not mean sovereignty. Who administers the machines? Where is the data necessary for support processed? Who holds the encryption keys? Which subcontractors are involved, and under what conditions can the client move its applications elsewhere?
The subject is already working with suppliers on the continent. OVHcloud is seeking to expand its network of European regions, while Scaleway is developing an offering focused on AI projects. Their nationality or that of their shareholders does not exempt them from examining their hardware and software dependencies. On the other hand, it changes the nature of certain questions of legal governance.
Europe wants more calculation without losing control
Alibaba arrives on a European market caught between two needs. Businesses need compute to develop and operate their AI applications. Public authorities are seeking to reduce dependencies that could weigh on critical services. The European Commission includes these two objectives in its draft framework for the cloud and AI: increasing data center capacities and better appreciating the different degrees of sovereignty of offers.
Demand will be the most useful judge of Alibaba’s expansion. Companies present in both Europe and Asia could find interest in its international network and in Qwen. Others will favor a European offer, an architecture distributed between suppliers or specific guarantees for their sensitive data. Mistral’s evolution towards computing and infrastructure reminds us that competition is no longer just about the quality of the models.
