OpenAI on Thursday launched data residency in Europe, allowing European organizations to meet local data sovereignty requirements while using the AI company’s products.
Data residency refers to the physical location of an organization’s data, as well as the local laws and policy requirements imposed on that data. Most tech giants and cloud providers offer European data residency programs, which help customers comply with European local privacy and data protection laws like the GDPR, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act, and the UK’s data protection legislation.
In October, developer platform GitHub launched cloud data residency in the EU for customers subscribed to its GitHub Enterprise plan. That same month, AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing division, launched a “sovereign cloud” for Europe that lets customers keep all metadata they create in the EU, and Google introduced data residency for machine learning processing for U.K.-based users of its Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.
Beginning Thursday, OpenAI customers using the company’s API can choose to process data in Europe for “eligible endpoints,” and new ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu customers can choose to have customer content stored at rest in Europe. Data “at rest” refers to data that’s not actively moving between networks or being accessed.
OpenAI says that, with European data residency enabled, API requests will be handled in-region by OpenAI with zero data retention, meaning that AI model requests and responses won’t be stored at rest on the company’s servers. When switched on for OpenAI’s AI-powered chat platform, ChatGPT, customer info including conversations with ChatGPT, user prompts, images, uploaded files, and custom bots will be stored at rest in the region, per OpenAI.
OpenAI notes that, as of now, European data residency can only be configured for new projects using the company’s API. Existing projects c …