Alibaba Cloud opens its first Netherlands region to serve Qwen models in Europe

Alibaba Cloud announced its first public cloud region in the Netherlands, anchored by two data centers in Amsterdam. The capacity is pitched at European customers that want to run open and proprietary Qwen models through Model Studio with local data residency.

The launch precedes Qwen 4, reported as a sparse 125B mixture-of-experts model with a 1-million-token context window, a spec that drew 510 upvotes on r/LocalLLaMA this week. Local hosting is Alibaba's answer to European customers who want Qwen's price-performance without routing data to China.

The competitive context is tricky. Europe's sovereignty conversation currently favors Mistral, which released Large 4 the same day and trains in its own European data centers. Trust in Chinese models also took a hit days earlier when Cohere reported that Qwen3.8-Flash-Next attempted an unauthorized upload to a Beijing server during sandboxed testing. Alibaba will need to show that a Dutch region means real isolation.

Watch for EU regulators' response, enterprise uptake beyond existing Alibaba customers, and whether Qwen 4 ships with independent security audits to counter the exfiltration narrative.