As AI-driven personalization becomes a critical competitive advantage for digital businesses, Zalando is leveraging Hopsworks' AI platform to power real-time customer experiences at scale. The collaboration highlights how high-performance AI infrastructure is enabling leading online retailers to deliver personalized recommendations and services while meeting strict requirements for performance, reliability, security and governance.
The announcement also underscores the growing role of European technology providers in supporting large-scale AI deployments across global enterprises.
Zalando is using Hopsworks to power high-performance AI-driven personalization services.
The platform supports over 62 million active Zalando users and scales to handle millions of operations per second.
Hopsworks enables real-time AI experiences designed to respond instantly to customer interactions.
The infrastructure is built to support demanding retail periods, including peak Cyber Week traffic.
Hopsworks positions itself as Europe’s only Lakehouse and AI company focused on large-scale AI systems.
The company is developing AI infrastructure optimized for batch, real-time and LLM-powered applications.
Digital services increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to deliver personalized experiences that adapt in real time to user behavior. From content recommendations to ecommerce product suggestions, modern AI systems are expected to respond almost instantly while processing vast amounts of data.
The success of platforms such as TikTok has demonstrated how personalization can become a key differentiator, helping organizations compete against larger and more established rivals. Similar trends are emerging in ecommerce, where retailers are investing heavily in AI-driven recommendation engines and personalized shopping experiences.
For enterprise retailers, however, delivering personalization at scale requires sophisticated software infrastructure capable of maintaining performance, reliability and governance under significant workloads.
As one of Europe's largest online fashion and lifestyle retailers, Zalando serves more than 62 million active users. Supporting personalized experiences for such a large audience requires infrastructure capable of processing enormous volumes of data and requests in real time.
According to Hopsworks, its platform scales to handle millions of operations per second, enabling Zalando to maintain high-performance AI services during peak demand periods such as Cyber Week.
The platform is designed to provide the low-latency performance required for interactive AI applications while ensuring uptime, security and operational governance.
The announcement also highlights the growing capabilities of European technology providers in the AI infrastructure market, a space often dominated by major US-based technology companies.
Commenting on the collaboration, Jim Dowling, CEO of Hopsworks, said:
“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.”
The statement reflects broader industry discussions around digital sovereignty, regional innovation and the development of AI platforms that align with European regulatory and governance requirements.
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, organizations are increasingly focused on creating interactive systems capable of delivering responses in real time. According to Hopsworks, achieving human-like responsiveness is becoming a critical benchmark for intelligent applications.
While major industry conferences continue to spotlight advancements from global data and AI vendors, Hopsworks emphasizes its focus on engineering high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting demanding production workloads.
Jim Dowling added:
“Interactive AI systems that don't respond at ‘human latencies’ will not be considered intelligent, they will just be considered slow.”
The company states that its engineering team, which includes more than 10 PhDs, is focused on developing next-generation AI infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly sophisticated and interactive applications.
The demand for real-time AI experiences is driving organizations to invest in platforms that can support batch processing, real-time inference and large language model (LLM) workloads within a unified architecture.
As businesses continue to prioritize personalization, customer engagement and intelligent automation, infrastructure providers capable of delivering scalable, low-latency AI systems are expected to play an increasingly important role in digital transformation strategies.
The Zalando-Hopsworks deployment demonstrates how retailers are adopting advanced AI infrastructure to deliver personalized customer experiences while maintaining the operational performance required for enterprise-scale environments.
About Hopsworks
Hopsworks is the leading unified platform for building batch, real-time, and LLM-powered AI systems, enabling organisations to go from raw data to production-ready AI and Data products at scale. As a European-founded, sovereign AI platform, Hopsworks is purpose-built for organisations that require data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. At its core is a powerful AI Lakehouse, combining a best-in-class feature store, model registry, and vector database covering the full pipeline lifecycle from data ingestion to batch, real-time, and agentic inference.
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