Alibaba promises data center expansion in Europe and the Middle East — but without site-specific timelines

Alibaba promises data center expansion in Europe and the Middle East — but without site-specific timelines

Chinese company Alibaba issued a concrete international push on Wednesday: brand-new cloud regions in three countries, expansions in five more, and a global capacity target of more than 20 gigawatts by 2032. But the company provides neither investment figures nor timelines per site — and analysts point to another reason to build outside China: the chip shortage.

Alibaba is set to significantly expand its data center capacity outside China over the next twelve months, with a main focus on Europe and the Middle East. The Chinese technology conglomerate announced this on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, in connection with its annual Apsara conference in Hangzhou, news agency Keystone-SDA reports.

According to the announcement, so-called cloud regions will be established for the first time in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands. At the same time, Alibaba plans to expand existing data centers in Germany, France and the United Arab Emirates, and expansions are also planned in Malaysia and Hong Kong. According to the news agency, the company provided neither investment figures, capacity numbers per site, nor detailed timelines for the individual expansions — only the twelve-month horizon and the geography.

The capacity target: 20 gigawatts by 2032

The international expansion should be understood against the backdrop of a larger capacity target. According to Bloomberg, Alibaba aims to have more than 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032. For comparison, the planned capacity measured in power corresponds roughly to twenty large nuclear power plants — but that is an illustrative comparison from the company, not a measure of actual production.

The figure marks an upgrade in how the company communicates the target. A year ago, CEO Eddie Wu promised only a tenfold increase in the data centers' energy consumption by 2032, according to TechNode. Now the ambition is framed as an absolute capacity of more than 20 gigawatts. The target is a company target and has not been independently verified.

Chips, models and the market reaction

The expansion announcement came in the middle of a busy conference week. On Tuesday, September 22, Wu delivered the keynote at the Apsara conference, where Alibaba announced the capacity target and presented plans to train a particularly powerful AI model with five to ten trillion parameters. According to the company itself, such a model would be several times larger than China's current largest model — a claim, not a verified comparison.

That same Tuesday, Alibaba's chip unit presented the Zhenwu V900, a chip that, according to the company, triples the performance of its predecessor and is to go on sale in early 2027, CNBC reports. According to Keystone-SDA, Wu has described it as "China's most powerful" chip — again as the company's own characterization. The market received the announcements with measured optimism: Alibaba's Hong Kong shares rose around 3 percent on Tuesday, according to CNBC.

Analyst: Data centers outside China as a chip detour

Why build capacity in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands? One interpretation circulating in the coverage of the conference points to a familiar bottleneck. Professor Chris Miller of Tufts University, author of the book Chip War, said, according to CNBC, that Chinese companies still lack substantial quantities of the chips needed to train and run advanced models, and that they rely heavily on smuggling chips or on access to data centers outside China.

This connection between US export controls and Alibaba's European and Turkish expansion is, however, analyst context, not a confirmed motive. Alibaba itself has not linked the announcement to the chip shortage, and no company statement confirming such a driver has been provided.

Open questions

Several key details are still missing from the published material. Alibaba has not disclosed investment volume, megawatt figures or site-specific timelines for the expansions in Europe and the Middle East — only the twelve-month framework. The 20-gigawatt capacity target is the company's own, and it remains unclear how the individual European and Turkish projects weigh into the overall target.

It is also worth noting that the keynote and the capacity target are dated to Tuesday, September 22 in CNBC's coverage, while the announcement of the international expansion came on Wednesday, September 23 according to Keystone-SDA. The two events appear to be part of the same conference, but the precise dating of each announcement varies between sources.

References: Keystone-SDA via Bluewin (82c8f01f), CNBC (7824ee0b), TheStreet/Yahoo Finance (dc7b626f).