GPU-based instances, functions, virtual desktops, and managed backups — among other services — are not yet available in Alibaba Cloud’s France region.
Now officially inaugurated, the new region comprises two availability zones. It is the third European region opened by the Chinese group after Frankfurt (2016; 3 AZ) and London (2018; 2 AZ). A further region in the Netherlands is planned for this year (where there is at present a network zone).
The opening is accompanied by a pledge to deploy, by the end of 2026, a “suite of agentic services” (development of agents, sandboxing, safeguards, security center…). At present, the “centre of gravity” Model Studio is not available in any of the three Alibaba Cloud European regions. This is also the case, among others, for:
- SASE
- DataHub (stream data processing)
- DevOps tooling
- Managed Grafana and OpenTelemetry (OTel)
- Detection of sensitive data, content moderation, fraud detection
Excluding global products (CDN, DNS, monitoring…), around twenty services are currently available in the France region. Among them:
- Compute instances
- Object, block and file storage
- Load balancing and elastic IPs
- VPC, NAT and VPN
- Managed Kubernetes and container registry
- Tablestore, ApsaraDB (RDS, MongoDB) and Tair (Redis-compatible)
- KMS
- Cloud orchestration
For GPU instances, virtual desktops, the FaaS platform, dedicated bare‑metal servers and various ApsaraDB variants (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, ClickHouse, SelectDB), you have to look to Frankfurt or London. Some services are exclusively hosted in the Frankfurt region. For example, OpenSearch, the WAF, certificate management, cloud HSM and IDaaS.
The job postings that circulated in recent months (data-center facilities manager, operations engineer, IT manager…) suggest a colocation model. The positions are based in Paris, where Alibaba Cloud’s French subsidiary (founded at the end of 2023) is located.
The “cloud + AI” business accounts for 15% of Alibaba’s revenue
In its latest annual report, published in May, Alibaba largely mentions Europe only in regulatory terms. On the radar are, in particular, the AI Act — and the uncertainties surrounding its evolution as Brussels dispatches omnibus packages. Another topic is the DSA, which led AliExpress to undertake a range of commitments (surveillance of products that could affect health and minors, handling of complaints, advertising transparency…). Alibaba also references the GDPR, and the actions several countries have taken regarding guarantees for data transfers to China.
For its 2026 fiscal year (ended March 31), Alibaba posted $148.4 billion in revenue (+3%). The rise in investments in its cloud infrastructure weighed on operating income (–64%, to $7.3 billion). This was alongside increased customer acquisition for the Qwen application.
At $22.9 billion (+34%), the “cloud + AI” activity (Cloud Intelligence Group) represented approximately 15% of the company’s total revenue.
