Data Residency

Data residency is the requirement that data be physically stored and processed in a specific country or region — for compliance with laws like GDPR or industry rules.

Data residency matters because data moving across borders triggers regulation: GDPR for EU residents, sector-specific rules for healthcare and finance, sovereign cloud requirements in some governments. AI complicates it because models often run in US data centers — choosing an in-region inference endpoint is often required.

Example

A German healthcare company picks Claude on AWS Frankfurt + EU-region vector store + EU data lake to keep all patient data inside the EU.

How OpenLabor uses it

OpenLabor offers EU-resident deployments where data and inference both stay in-region.

Does using an LLM violate data residency?

Only if the model runs out of region. Frontier providers offer region-pinned endpoints — pick one explicitly in your contract.

Related: gdpr, audit-trail, pii-redaction.

AI Labor Glossary