Zalando, Europe's largest online retailer, is using Hopsworks, a European AI platform, to power its high-performance per

Hopsworks AB announced that Zalando is leveraging the Hopsworks platform to deliver personalized digital experiences at scale. With over 62 million active users, Zalando faces demanding infrastructure requirements for high performance, zero downtime, security, and governance. Hopsworks scales to handle millions of operations per second, meeting the performance demands during peak periods such as Cyber Week.

Jim Dowling, CEO of Hopsworks, commented on the significance of this partnership: "There is a perception that Europe does not have companies that compete in these high-end software platforms that support AI systems. However, today we are pleased to report that Zalando are powering their highest performance, most demanding AI services with a European-owned and operated AI platform, Hopsworks."

Hopsworks positions itself as Europe's only Lakehouse and AI company, distinct from US giants Snowflake and Databricks which dominate industry conference seasons. The company emphasizes its development work over marketing, with a team including over 10 PhDs focused on building the world's highest performance data platform for interactive AI. Dowling noted that "Interactive AI systems that don't respond at 'human latencies' will not be considered intelligent, they will just be considered slow."

The Hopsworks platform is a unified solution for building batch, real-time, and LLM-powered AI systems, enabling organizations to move from raw data to production-ready AI and data products at scale. As a European-founded, sovereign AI platform, it is designed for organizations requiring data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. The core offering includes a powerful AI Lakehouse combining a feature store, model registry, and vector database that covers the complete pipeline from data ingestion through batch, real-time, and agentic inference.

Zalando, with reported 2025 GMV of 17.6 billion euros, became Europe's largest online retailer, surpassing Allegro at 16.5 billion euros and Otto Group at 15 billion euros.