New site to run on 100% green power

Alibaba’s cloud division has opened a data center in Germany designed specifically for AI and machine learning applications.

The new center is based in Frankfurt and will service customers in the automotive, retail and manufacturing space.

Its cooling operations are equipped with dry coolers instead of mechanical refrigeration. According to Alibaba’s cloud division, the site will use 100% green electricity to power its operation and will use a cloud-based platform to monitor and optimize its daily carbon footprint.

Alibaba stressed that its new German site “adheres to the highest security standards” and is compliant with the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) in Germany. C5 is a set of rules laid out by the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, or BSI), and defines a baseline security level for cloud computing.

The site also cleared an audit under the German AI Cloud Services Compliance Criteria Catalogue, a testing standard for certifying the security of AI applications implemented in Germany.

Alibaba said its three German facilities can provide European customers with high availability and robust disaster recovery capabilities

“The third data center launch underscores our continuous commitment to serving the local German and European markets,” said Raymond Ma, general manager of Europe at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

The new facility marks Alibaba’s third data center in Germany, with the Chinese company opening its first German site in Frankfurt back in 2016. Since its initial opening, the company introduced several AI services to the market, including an ML platform for AI, intelligence speech interaction and GPU clusters for cloud-based innovation.

Alibaba’s European presence also can be found in the U.K.; however, the bulk of its data center sites are located across China.