OpenAI has announced that it is expanding data residency options for its business customers worldwide, allowing eligible users of ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu and the OpenAI API Platform to store their data “at rest” within selected regions a move designed to help organizations comply with local data-protection and regulatory requirements. With this update, more than 1 million business customers globally can now choose to keep customer content including ChatGPT conversations, uploaded files, custom GPTs, and image-generation artifacts in-region. Currently supported regions include Europe, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates, with plans to expand to more regions over time. For API users who have been approved for advanced data controls, regional data residency can be enabled when creating a new project so that model requests and responses are processed and handled in-region, without being stored at rest on OpenAI’s servers. This enhanced control builds on OpenAI’s existing enterprise-grade privacy, security and compliance framework including AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, optional customer-managed encryption keys (EKM), and adherence to standards such as SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001/27017/27018/27701. By default, customer data from ChatGPT business plans or the API is not used to train OpenAI’s models unless a customer explicitly opts in ensuring ownership and confidentiality remain with the customer.
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This global data-residency expansion may remove one of the major compliance and regulatory hurdles for enterprises and government agencies seeking to deploy AI at scale, by giving them the flexibility to align data storage and processing with local laws, sovereignty requirements and privacy regulations.
