Announcing Data Residency At-Rest and During Machine Learning (ML)-Processing

We've seen tremendous demand for Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities across the globe and here in Canada. And, we know that some industries, customers and use cases have greater requirements around data residency in their jurisdictions before they can leverage these capabilities to their fullest extent.

That’s why today, we’re excited to extend our commitment to data residency: customers can now perform ML processing for Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash in Canada.

New data residency offerings

Last fall, we announced that organizations in Canada using Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities can choose to store their data at-rest in the region. This includes Generative AI on Vertex AI - PaLM 2, Codey and Imagen models, as well as the Text Embeddings and Multimodal Embeddings APIs.

Starting today, Canadian organizations across every industry and the public sector can store their data at-rest and perform ML processing for our latest large language models -- Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash -- in Canada.

These commitments mean:

• Data residency at-rest: We commit to storing your data only in the specific geographic locations you select, as outlined in our Cloud Locations Page and Service Specific Terms.
• Data residency during ML processing: We commit to performing ML processing of your data within the same specific region or multi-region where it's stored. This includes inference and all other ML processing that happens prior to output generation.

Customer feedback

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. Canadian customers have expressed early excitement about how these offerings will help their organizations.

“One of the pillars of our strategic partnership with Google Cloud has been focused on bringing advanced AI solutions to our Canadian customers,” said Hesham Fahmy, Chief Information Officer at TELUS. “With Google Cloud’s Canadian data residency and machine learning processing on Vertex AI and Gemini, TELUS can deliver cutting-edge AI technology while fully respecting Canadian data sovereignty. This fulfills a crucial compliance requirement for our customers, and we look forward to partnering with Google Cloud on this journey.”

For more information on Google Cloud’s data residency offerings, see here. For more details on how Google Cloud develops AI services, see our white paper on our Approach to AI Governance, and to learn more about our AI platform, click here.