Chinese cloud provider Alibaba has opened two new cloud availability zones (AZs) based in Paris, France.

Their June 17 opening comes weeks after Alibaba signed a deal to provide "global AI, cloud computing and e-commerce" capabilities to European football organisation UEFA, which runs the Champions' League.

The AZs represent its first new European region since 2018. Alibaba also has data centres in Germany and the UK.

Alibaba CTO Feifei Li said the move “reinforces our ongoing commitment to empowering European businesses with sovereign, secure, and intelligent solutions” as the company targets a global user base.

The French AZs will support services like Alibaba’s Elastic Compute and its fully managed object storage offering, alongside services like Edge Node and Data Management available in all Europe zones.

It was not immediately unclear if the regions will be served by Alibaba-owned data centres or from racks in a co-located DC.

International expansion

The launch comes almost nine months after the Alibaba Group subsidiary announced a fresh international expansion, revealing plans for data centres in France, Brazil and the Netherlands.

All would launch "in the coming year", it said in September 2025.

It currently operates 32 regions, with the vast majority, 24, in Asia and 16 of them in its home country of China, according to the Alibaba Cloud website.

In a FY2026 earnings call in May, CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba needed to expand its data centre footprint by 10x, compared to 2022, to keep up with business goals and AI-related demand.

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The company's CapEx was $18.3 billion in the 12 months prior to March 2026.

Wu said Alibaba Cloud expects to see CapEx “far exceed” the $56 billion it had previously expected to spend over the next five years.

The sovereign question

Alibaba claimed that it has built the project with "strict data privacy and sovereignty in mind" ensuring it meets "rigorous European regulatory frameworks and standards."

The Chinese company was chosen as the official cloud provider at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. In late May this year it also revealed a multi-year deal with the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)

UEFA will use Alibaba's Qwen AI models to support fan engagement and content management, it said.