Mental BoundWhat is data residency?
Data residency is the commitment that data is stored and processed within a defined geography — a country, the EU, or a cloud provider's region. For AI services it has two halves: where inference runs (the region that receives your prompt and generates the answer) and where data rests (uploaded files, logs, retained conversations). Residency is not the same as compliance: GDPR allows transfers outside the EU with the right safeguards, but many procurement, sector and public-body rules simply require EU processing, and residency is how you prove it.
Which Claude paths offer EU data residency?
As of September 2026, two: Amazon Bedrock, through EU inference profiles and in-region endpoints such as Stockholm and Ireland, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI / Agent Platform, through its eu multi-region endpoint. The Claude API, Claude Platform on AWS and Microsoft Foundry offer only global or US-only processing, and the Claude apps (Team and Enterprise) have a US-only option rather than an EU one. If residency is a hard requirement, it narrows the choice before any feature comparison — which is why it is the first question in our AI governance reviews and in cloud architecture work. All seven ways to get Claude are compared in Seven paths to Claude.