Amsterdam tech this week: eleven of sixteen events land in 48 hours (23-29 October 2026)

Thursday is the week. Six of the sixteen tech events on our Amsterdam city page between 23 and 29 October fall on Thursday 29th, five more on Wednesday 28th. Eleven of sixteen inside 48 hours, two of them full conferences. Book the back half of the week first.

The Big One: Alibaba Cloud brings Apsara to the Beurs van Berlage

Apsara Conference 2026 takes the Beurs van Berlage on Thursday 29 October, and it costs nothing. One day on the Qwen model family and agent-native cloud infrastructure, run by Alibaba Cloud. Doors and welcome remarks at 09:30, and the programme runs the full day.

A free vendor conference at this scale is rare here, and the trade is clear: this is Alibaba Cloud's account of its own stack. Go for the Qwen roadmap and the infrastructure sessions.

The counterweight runs the day before. FastAPI Conf 2026 is the first conference built around FastAPI: one day, one track, from 09:00, EUR 250, at the Transformatorhuis in Westerpark. Sebastian Ramirez, who created FastAPI, is on the programme, alongside Colvin, Trylesinski, Voron, Liu, Bailey, Cailliau and Falk. Until this week our row carried no venue name and "Amsterdam, Netherlands" as its address. It's the Transformatorhuis, a former industrial hall on the Westergas site; the listing says so now.

The week ahead, sorted by what you'd actually use it for

Things that ship something. AI Inference in the Real World: From Kubernetes to the Far Edge is the thirteenth AI Native Netherlands meetup, hosted at AWS Amsterdam on Tuesday 27th, free, built on one question: what should run where, on which hardware, and how you keep it up. The cleanest engineering evening of the week. AI4ALL Masterclass: Build Your First AI App on Thursday 17:30, Nieuwe Herengracht 95, has you build and ship a working app inside the session — it's paid, and no figure is published. Claude for Her opens the week on Friday at the Vrije Universiteit: a full hands-on day for women at beginner-to-intermediate level, on real tasks rather than demos. Data Thursday closes it at B. Amsterdam B3 on Johan Huizingalaan, from 18:00, on a Climate Week theme.

Rooms designed for meeting people. Finder: Meet Your Co-founder is structured matchmaking at the Kohnstammhuis on Wibautstraat, Thursday 16:00, run jointly by AMS Institute, Venture Centre HvA, Demonstrator Lab and Startup Village. FOUNDERS #5 on Monday 16:30 at The Floor, Roeterseilandcampus, brings in Floris Weers and Ives van Hoorne of Biscuit. And the Go To Market Event 2026 at B. Amsterdam on Wednesday is for AI and B2B founders and commercial leads, run by Scaler Company and Gradient with the AI Coalition's Breaking Barriers programme. It runs 13:00 to 18:00 with drinks from 16:45 — hours we resubmitted the listing last week to get right.

Where the city argues with itself. The Sustainable Supermarket puts Net Impact Amsterdam inside Picnic HQ on Tuesday 18:00 — an all-electric last-mile fleet and demand data, from the people running it. Your Cycle, Your Data & AI at the OZW building, Thursday 16:30, takes apart what period-tracking apps infer from what you type in. AI for Education The Netherlands 2026 runs two days from Thursday at the VU, on assessment integrity and what the evidence supports.

The regulars. Coffee Coding at The Coffee Room on Kinkerstraat, Saturday 09:30 — bring the thing you're stuck on. Wednesday night splits three ways: Appsterdam's Weekly Meeten en Drinken at Cafe Bax, the Social Evening at TechInc in the ACTA building, which is explicitly built for newcomers, and WP Meetup Amsterdam at Stayokay Oost, where Hussain Bharmal opens on AI in WordPress development and Jens De Beule follows on agentic workflows.

Last week, briefly

TechEx Europe owned the RAI from Monday to Thursday: eight co-located conferences under one badge, free, with a LabLab AI hackathon running alongside and a Women in Product NL drop-in on the show floor. Code BEAM Europe ran at the Philharmonie, which is in Haarlem — fifteen minutes by train, and still on our Amsterdam page while two venue-twins sit off it. Ours to settle. With the RAI emptied out, this week's centre of gravity moves to Westergas and the Beurs.

Who should go where

Founders, this is your week. Monday's FOUNDERS #5, Wednesday's Go To Market Event and Thursday's Finder give you a fireside, a commercial afternoon and a co-founder search in four days. If you pick one, Finder: structured matching beats a room of business cards.

Builders, Tuesday at AWS and Wednesday at the Transformatorhuis. If EUR 250 isn't in your budget, Tuesday's inference evening covers much of the same production ground for free.

Sales and marketing, thin week. The Go To Market Event is the one with buyers in it.

Investors, quieter still. Finder on Thursday is where the earliest-stage founders are; nobody's pitching you from a stage this week.

Worth knowing

Amsterdam Tech Job Fair (12 November) came off our city page on 21 October as a recruitment drive. Its venue is still unpublished. If you find it elsewhere, the organiser's page routes your ticket on to Eventbrite anyway, past paid candidate add-ons — coaching at EUR 99, an invitation letter at EUR 50, CV services from EUR 49, an HR pass at EUR 250. The free ticket is still there behind them.
GoDataFest runs 26-30 October at Xebia, free, five days — and it isn't on our city page, because no start time has been published and we won't publish a time we can't stand behind. Xebia's own page has the agenda.
AI Tinkerers Amsterdam has a demo night on 27 October, off our city page because the venue goes only to registrants. We'd had their site down as dormant; it isn't.
BSides Amsterdam (19 November, KIT Amsterdam) has sold its first ticket wave out, with a final wave to come. Our listing shows it as bookable, because our availability field has no way to say otherwise. Every sell-out fact on this site lives in the description, not the booking status.

Frequently asked

Does an RSVP hold me a seat?

Depends where you clicked. A Luma registration takes you without an account and holds a place. A Meetup RSVP has no guest path at all — you need an account, and on approval-gated events the host reads your profile before letting you in. Fill the profile in before you RSVP, not after.

Is a "free" event always free?

No. An event listed with no price at all stores as free in our system, which means a free label on a row whose organiser publishes nothing is an artefact rather than a fact. Thursday's AI4ALL Masterclass is paid with no figure published — so we say paid, and no number.

Across the network

Berlin's calendar halves this week, 26 events down to 13, and Thursday 29 October carries it: the Women in Tech EMEA Summit at smartvillage and Thursday Gathering #76 at CIC Berlin, same afternoon. The full Berlin listings are here.

Something missing? Send us your event and tell us what we got wrong — the Amsterdam calendar improves every week people do.