Alibaba Cloud has launched a new cloud region in the Netherlands and a new generation of its on-premises cloud offering.

The cloud division of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group this week announced the launch of its first public cloud region in the Netherlands.

Located in Amsterdam, the region has two data centers that are now available.

“The Netherlands is one of Europe's most vibrant digital economies, and our first region here is a direct response to the strong demand we see from local businesses building and scaling with AI,” said Feifei Li, CTO and president of international business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

"By bringing our advanced AI and cloud capabilities to Amsterdam, we are giving customers the in-region infrastructure, performance and data residency they need to innovate faster, scale securely and operate with greater efficiency in the AI era."

Alibaba said the new region can help the company deliver more resilient, low-latency services, strengthen disaster recovery, and support customers who require their data to be processed and stored locally in the Netherlands and within Europe.

The new Netherlands region expands Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure to 109 availability zones across 32 regions worldwide. In Europe, the company operates regions in Germany (Frankfurt), the UK (London) and France (Paris).

The company said it is also planning to establish its first cloud regions in Finland, and is expanding its data center footprints in Germany and France over the next 12 months.

“For us at orq.ai, the value of local infrastructure is what businesses can build on it. We welcome Alibaba's investment in the Netherlands and look forward to working together to help more organizations put AI into everyday use in a reliable and scalable way,” said Anthony Diaz, co-founder and CPTO of Netherlands-based LLM platform orq.ai.

Alibaba has also announced the latest generation of Apsara Stack, its hybrid cloud solution. The new solution delivers more than 80 cloud and AI products on-premises. The first version of the stack launched outside China in 2018.