Alibaba Cloud has opened its third data centre in Germany, offering a range of services that include storage, networking, database, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

The new facility in Frankfurt would support enterprise customers across Europe as they increased their digital transformation efforts, Alibaba said in a statement Tuesday. Its clientele in the region encompassed verticals such as automotive, manufacturing, retail, and games.

The latest data centre pushes the Chinese vendor's global footprint to 84 availability zones across 27 regions that, outside of China, includes Singapore, Australia, Japan, and Indonesia. 

With data stored locally, Alibaba said the new site complied with Germany's security standards and regulations outlined in the country's Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5). It 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.

The data centre also was equipped with dry coolers, which tapped natural cool ambient air--instead of mechanical refrigeration--as part of its cooling operations. This was expected to generate "free" cooling capabilities in excess of 7,000 hours a year, according to Alibaba. 

It added that it was targeting to tap 100% green electricity to power its operations at the data centre, which encompassed the use of an intelligent cloud-based platform to monitor and optimise its daily carbon footprint.

Alibaba opened its first data centre in Frankfurt in 2016. 

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