Safety
Data residency
Data residency is the guarantee that your requests are processed within a specific geography, usually required by contract or regulation.
By default inference may run anywhere the provider has capacity. Pinning it to a region is an explicit option and commonly carries a price premium of around ten percent.
It is frequently a precondition for enterprise customers, which makes it a sales requirement as much as a compliance one.
In practice
Where the compute happens determines which rules apply, and several providers offer regional processing as an opt-in rather than a default. The related item people miss is the subprocessor list: your provider has providers, that list is part of your disclosure surface, and it changes without a release note.
Common questions
Can I control which country processes my data?
Several providers offer regional processing, usually as an opt-in rather than a default. Check the account you are actually calling from, because the setting is per-account or per-deployment rather than global.
What about the provider's own subprocessors?
They are part of your disclosure surface and the list changes without a release note. Read it before signing and monitor it afterwards — it is the part of a data path that moves without you doing anything.