Accelerating generative AI around the world with new data residency guarantees

Demand for enterprise-ready generative AI services is increasing around the world. As companies look to leverage generative AI to the fullest, many want to be able to control where their data is stored in light of growing data sovereignty and global regulatory requirements.

For this reason, we’re announcing that customers using Google Cloud’s generative AI services can choose to store their data at-rest in any of the 10 available countries across North America, Europe, and Asia. This is part of our ongoing commitment to expand data residency for our customers and meet industry demands.

New Vertex AI data residency regions

With our new data residency commitments for Vertex AI generative capabilities, we commit to storing customer data in customer-selected locations consistent with Google Cloud’s General Service Terms. This specifically includes:

• Generative AI on Vertex AI — which includes PaLM 2, Codey, and Imagen models, as well as the Text Embeddings and Multimodal Embeddings APIs — offers customers data store options for
  • North America: US and Canada
  • Europe: Netherlands, France, UK, Germany, and Belgium
  • Asia: Japan, Singapore, and Korea
• Vertex AI Search offers customers data store options for
  • North America: US (multi-region)
  • Europe: EU (multi-region)
• Vertex AI Conversation offers customers data store options for
  • North America: US (multi-region)
  • Europe: EU (multi-region)

“In light of Google Cloud’s data residency commitments in Japan for generative AI services like PaLM 2, Minna Bank will be using generative AI services in Vertex AI. This was a very important update for the financial industry and other industries that demand high standards of privacy, security, and governance because we can now control where data is stored,” said Masaaki Miyamoto, Executive Officer & CIO, Minna Bank

We look forward to continuing to bring generative AI capabilities with data residency controls to Google Cloud customers in more places around the world.

Enterprise-ready generative AI

Our new data residency guarantees continue our commitment to providing AI services with enterprise-grade scale, safety, security and privacy. At Google Cloud we recognize our important role in bringing Google research to products to enable organizations around the world to use the power of AI.

Protecting customer data and privacy has always been core to Google Cloud’s mission, and this commitment is more important than ever as AI continues to evolve and mass adoption increases. Beyond our new data residency regions, here are key facts about how we handle customer data and privacy:

• Customers control their data and models and control access to them. Organizations dictate who can access their data and models and how these assets can be used.
• Customers control where and how data and models are stored. Organizations can opt to store data in locations they select, preventing deployments outside specified geographic boundaries.
• Customer data is never used by Google. We do not use customer data to train our models, or models used by others, without permission.
• Customer data is available when it’s needed. Our data centers and network architecture are designed for maximum reliability and resiliency, meaning our AI products are held to the same high availability standards as other Google Cloud services.
• Customers enjoy enterprise-grade security and privacy defaults. Whether for specific security needs or to meet regulatory requirements, Google Cloud’s AI services let organizations apply privacy protections and fine-grained security controls across their data and models.

Additionally, Google Cloud stands behind these guarantees with technical controls, contractual terms, and industry-recognized certifications and audits. This means when organizations build or tune models on our AI platform, our shared fate approach to risk management means we partner with the organization from day one to protect data and models. These efforts include a collaborative approach to cybersecurity and the development of our Secure AI framework (SAIF), which offers practical considerations to help enterprises mitigate AI-specific risks.

Google Cloud looks forward to continuing to expand our data residency commitments and will share more soon. For more information on how Google Cloud develops AI services, see our Responsible AI page, and to learn more about our AI platform, click here.