OpenAI Expands Data Residency to Europe

OpenAI rolled out a new feature on Thursday that's a big deal for European organizations—data residency in Europe. This move helps these groups stick to local data sovereignty rules while still tapping into OpenAI's AI goodies. Data residency, in case you're wondering, is all about where your data physically sits and the local laws it has to play by. Big tech players and cloud services have been offering this kind of thing in Europe for a while now, helping customers meet the strict privacy and data protection laws like GDPR, Germany's Federal Data Protection Act, and the U.K.'s data protection rules.

Back in October, GitHub jumped on the bandwagon with cloud data residency in the EU for its GitHub Enterprise subscribers. That same month, AWS, Amazon's cloud computing arm, launched a "sovereign cloud" for Europe, letting customers keep their metadata within the EU. Google wasn't far behind, rolling out data residency for machine learning processing for U.K. users of its Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.

Starting Thursday, OpenAI's API users can choose to process their data in Europe for certain endpoints. Plus, new ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu customers can opt to store their customer content in Europe when it's not being used or moved around—what we call "data at rest."

OpenAI promises that with European data residency turned on, API requests will be handled in-region without any data hanging around on their servers. And for ChatGPT users, all your chats, prompts, images, files, and custom bots will be stored in Europe when they're at rest.

There's a catch, though: European data residency is only available for new projects using OpenAI's API. If you've got existing projects, you can't switch them over to European residency.

"We're excited to work with more organizations in Europe and beyond on their AI projects, all while keeping up the highest standards of security, privacy, and compliance," OpenAI shared in a blog post on Thursday.

European data watchdogs have had their eyes on OpenAI before, questioning whether the company's playing by the local data rules. Spain and Germany, among others, have looked into OpenAI's ChatGPT data practices, and Italy's data protection authority, which once temporarily blocked ChatGPT, slapped OpenAI with a €15 million ($15.6 million) fine in December for allegedly breaking European consumer data protection rules. And it's not just OpenAI; where AI services store data is a hot topic. DeepSeek, a viral AI startup from China, has also caught the attention of regulators for processing data in its home country.

Early last year, the European Data Protection Board's task force dropped a report to help guide EU countries' data protection authorities as they dig into ChatGPT. The report covered things like whether it's legal to collect training data for ChatGPT, how transparent the process is, and how accurate the data is.