Data residency
Data residency is the requirement that data is stored, and often processed, in a specific country or region. For AI it covers where prompts are processed by the model as well as where account data and logs are kept.
Why it matters for companies
GDPR transfer rules, sector regulators and customer contracts often set a location. Storage location and processing location are separate questions, and a review should ask for both.
Cloud vendors document them separately too. Google Cloud says Vertex AI data at rest "remains at rest in that location", and that with jurisdictional endpoints "ML processing stays within that specific geographical region".
Example
A German insurer's contracts require personal data to be processed in Europe. IT asks each AI vendor three things: where prompts are processed, where logs are stored, and what happens when the preferred endpoint is unavailable.
How Standard Compute handles it
Your account and usage records are stored in Frankfurt, Germany, and our EU gateway runs in Finland. Request records hold metadata only (model, provider, tokens, cost and status), never your prompts or outputs.
Set a Europe rule for your company, a team or a single key, and every request, including retries and fallbacks, is served only by approved European inference endpoints. If no European endpoint can serve it, the request is refused before your prompt is sent.