Amsterdam

Amsterdam Smart City, the partnership platform whose name long stood for the city’s innovation work, no longer runs. Renamed Amsterdam InChange, it was wound down during 2025, according to the Amsterdam Economic Board’s annual report. Its innovation lab and network were folded into the Board, and its articles moved to Open Research Amsterdam, the city’s own platform for research and knowledge.

From our library

Amsterdam Economic Board – Jaarverslag 2025

Details Amsterdam’s 2025 report reveals the Smart City platform’s closure and emergence of new Tech‑AI, health, and circular coalitions.

Read more →

The Board brings together companies, universities and governments across the metropolitan region, with about 130 paying partners at the end of 2025. In its tech and AI work the city is a lead partner with the payments company Adyen, the city of Almere, the Vrije Universiteit (VU), the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Waag. With Rabobank and AMS Institute among others, the Board is also exploring how start-ups and small firms can become digitally autonomous.

AMS Institute is an independent urban-research institute set up by TU Delft, Wageningen University & Research and MIT, and it works in partnership with the city. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the VU and the applied-sciences university add work on responsible IT and energy. On the Marineterrein, a former naval yard beside the old centre, an independent bureau runs a living lab on land and water. A project plan adopted in 2023 foresees about 800 homes on the site.

Organisation in focus

AMS Institute

Creates scalable urban solutions with data, AI, interdisciplinary research for resilient cities.

Read more →

Organisation in focus

Marineterrein Amsterdam Living Lab

Transforms historic naval base into urban innovation hub testing sustainable technologies.

Read more →

Waag works with Commons Network, a policy group on shared public goods, and with Cybersoek, which gives residents free digital help and hands out refurbished laptops. Together they warned the new coalition in June 2026 that data centres built by Microsoft, Google and Meta had set off a contest for scarce energy and water. Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom, examined the city’s welfare-risk model in a partnership with MIT Technology Review and the Dutch newspaper Trouw.

Venture money is counted nationally. Dutch tech companies raised €2.64bn in 2025, and the country had 11,301 active tech companies, according to Techleap’s State of Dutch Tech 2026. Its summary gives no figure for Amsterdam alone. For anyone building here, the binding limit is the grid: about 560 customers were still waiting for a connection in November 2025.

Amsterdam elected its council on 18 March 2026, on a turnout of 47.3%. GroenLinks (GreenLeft) won 10 of the 45 seats, D66 (social liberals) 8 and the PvdA (Labour) 7. GroenLinks and the PvdA then formed one group, PRO Amsterdam, and with D66 hold 25 seats. Their executive took office in June under Femke Halsema, the mayor since 2018; Dutch mayors are appointed, not elected. The agreement places digital affairs in a D66 package with economic affairs, which Melanie van der Horst took.

Their agreement, Jouw stad is mijn stad (“Your city is my city”), says Amsterdam should become as digitally independent as possible of (American) tech giants. By 2030 at least 30% of the city’s cloud storage and applications should come from Dutch or European suppliers. It rules out facial recognition and keeps the registration duty for sensors. Every algorithm the city uses is to be tested against ethical principles and entered in the public register.

From our library

Jouw stad is mijn stad. Coalitieakkoord 2026–2030 PRO Amsterdam en D66 Amsterdam

The 2026–2030 coalition agreement: no facial recognition, a European cloud share, free laptops.

Read more →

The targets come from the Meerjarenstrategie Digitale Autonomie 2026–2035 (multi-year digital autonomy strategy), adopted by the previous executive on 20 January 2026. Its starting point is candid: the public cloud is organised around Microsoft Azure, and the city also runs about 1,300 small cloud services from outside suppliers. A sourcing and cloud strategy presented the next day sets the rule “autonomous, unless” for business-critical systems and confidential data.

The first phase, with pilots of Nextcloud, open-source file-sharing software, and of a national standard platform, was costed at €3.2–4.5m and not yet funded when the strategy was adopted. A first estimate by the consultancy Deloitte puts the extra running cost at €7m a year. The coalition agreement says it will make money available to carry the strategy out, without naming a sum.

The first tender in which the city tried to steer towards autonomy was won by Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider that also runs the platform behind DigiD, the national login. By February 2026 Solvinity faced a takeover by the American firm Kyndryl, an outcome Binnenlands Bestuur called a debacle. In May the national government banned the takeover on the advice of its investment-screening bureau, and in July a Rotterdam court declined to suspend the ban. ChatAmsterdam, the staff AI assistant in use since November 2024, is hosted on Microsoft’s cloud.

The national digitalisation strategy shares the city’s cloud target, and Amsterdam works with VNG, the association of Dutch municipalities, towards a government cloud. Debate on public algorithms recalls the toeslagenaffaire, the childcare-benefits scandal: in December 2020 a parliamentary inquiry found that the basic principles of the rule of law had been violated. More than 5,000 Amsterdam parents had registered as affected by 2022.

From our library

Meerjarenstrategie Digitale Autonomie 2026–2035

The city’s ten-year plan to move off big-tech clouds, with an honest baseline and first costs.

Read more →

Amsterdam was the first municipality with an algorithm register, according to its audit office, the Rekenkamer. In September 2023 the register listed only 29 algorithms where there may have been hundreds. Of the 12 the audit examined, only the Slimme Check (“smart check”), a welfare-fraud risk model, had a bias analysis, and that covered 4 of the 16 characteristics the city had flagged. The register now redirects to the national Algoritmeregister, which lists 72 Amsterdam algorithms, 52 of them in use.

Signalen is the tool that travelled. Amsterdam built the open-source app in 2018 so residents could report problems in public space, and by 2024 it ran in 39 Dutch municipalities. Now maintained with VNG, it serves about 3 million residents, and about 2,800 civil servants handle more than 800,000 reports a year with it. VNG has published no figures on how quickly the reported problems are fixed.

The Slimme Check was meant to pick out welfare applications for extra investigation. The city’s welfare department spent three years developing it and trained it on 3,400 past investigations. In March 2022 the Participatieraad, an advisory council of welfare recipients that was disbanded in 2024, advised stopping it on the grounds that it would harm residents’ fundamental rights. A live pilot ran on about 1,600 applications from April to August 2023.

Independent reporting by MIT Technology Review and Lighthouse Reports found that the model flagged more applicants rather than fewer and was no better than caseworkers at finding cases that warranted scrutiny. Reweighting before the pilot had evened out its treatment of Dutch and non-Dutch applicants. In the pilot it wrongly flagged women and Dutch nationals more often. Rutger Groot Wassink, the GroenLinks alderman for social affairs, stopped it in late November 2023, at an estimated cost of about €500,000 plus €35,000 for Deloitte. The city’s own page on the project says the model appeared to perform better than the old method, with fewer false positives, and calls the bias analysis inconclusive.

From our library

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

How the Slimme Check welfare model, built by the responsible-AI book, still flagged more people and was stopped.

Read more →

The city-wide 30 km/h limit has been in force since 8 December 2023. In its first year, crashes involving a motor vehicle fell by 11% on the roads concerned, from 926 to 823, and those with cyclists or pedestrians by 15%. Total crashes rose, because cyclists had more crashes with each other or on their own. 63% of drivers stayed at or under 35 km/h. Buses lost about 40 seconds a trip and trams 10, while emergency services lost none.

Smart traffic lights were dropped in January 2025. The city had tested lights that gave cyclists priority over cars in the rain at two junctions, and a year earlier had said every light would become intelligent. Melanie van der Horst, then alderman for traffic, cited cybersecurity and privacy concerns, a limited effect and maintenance costs well above those of ordinary lights. She had also announced that parking scan cars would no longer be used to look for stolen cars, with privacy the deciding factor.

Public Eye, which counted people in crowded places from camera images, ran from 2019 to 2021 and reached about 90% accuracy by the city’s own account. Druktebeeld, a public crowd map started in 2022, is out of use too; the city could not independently establish that the location data from its supplier, Resono, were fully anonymised. The Langzaam Verkeer Monitoringsysteem (slow-traffic monitoring system) still counts pedestrians and cyclists. Its register entry concedes that at very low counts, combined with other data, one passer-by’s route past several sensors could in theory be followed.

ATELIER, an EU-funded project to make Buiksloterham, a former industrial area north of the IJ, a positive-energy district, ended in April 2026 after an eighteen-month extension. It did not reach a fully energy-positive balance. The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, a partner, names a delayed waste-recovery station, grid congestion and slow permits for more renewables. The shared battery has covered its grid-transport costs from market revenue since September 2025.

The registers make the switching-off visible: anyone can look up that the welfare model went out of use in September 2023 and the camera head-counts in January 2021. Control has followed ownership more than listing. Signalen, written and owned by the city, is still running and now serves dozens of other councils. The autonomy strategy names the opposite case, a public cloud built on a single supplier, as the dependence it sets out to reduce.