Dedicated hardware, in the Netherlands, under one jurisdiction.
Where an environment runs is usually treated as a procurement detail. For a frontier lab it is closer to an architecture decision, so it is worth being precise about what the location does and about what it does not.
On dedicated hardware in a Tier III facility in the Netherlands, reserved for one lab and shared with no other customer, with access keys held by that lab and operator access granted only on request and logged. The operator, the contract and the machines sit under one European jurisdiction, which is a concrete answer for labs that want training infrastructure outside other jurisdictions. Deployment inside a lab's own infrastructure is available on request.
Trajectories, not people.
It is worth saying plainly, because the usual data-residency conversation is about personal data and this is not that. What moves through a training environment is observations, actions, rewards and episode state — generated by software, about software. There is no customer record in it and no player in it.
So the sensitivity is not privacy. It is competitive: those trajectories are a readable account of how a lab's agents behave and how fast they improve. That is why benned stores none of them and meters only instance hours and concurrency.
What distillation risk meansOne jurisdiction, end to end.
The operator is a Dutch company, the service agreement runs under European law, the hardware stands in a European facility, and no third-country access path exists by default. For a lab whose infrastructure is otherwise concentrated in one jurisdiction, that is a second option rather than a statement of values.
It also makes the audit question simple. Architecture, access logs and operating procedures are shared with a customer's security team before a pilot starts, and the thing being audited is in one place.
Three things European hosting will not buy you.
A hosting location gets oversold routinely, and a lab that discovers the limits after signing has every right to be annoyed. So, before signing:
What the AI Act does ask of you- It does not make a model compliantObligations follow the market a model is placed on, not the postcode of the hardware it trained against.
- It does not replace isolationSeparation between labs is architectural — separate hardware, no stored agent data, lab-held keys. Geography adds nothing to that on its own.
- It does not settle your own rulesYour export controls, internal security policy and model-release process are yours. We can fit them; we cannot answer them.
About hosting and jurisdiction
Where does a benned environment physically run?
On dedicated hardware in a Tier III facility in the Netherlands, reserved for one lab and shared with no other customer. Deployment inside a lab’s own infrastructure is possible on request.
Is this a GDPR question?
Mostly not. What moves through a training environment is observations, actions and rewards generated by software, not personal data about people. GDPR matters for the ordinary business relationship — contacts, contracts, support — and rarely for the runs themselves.
What does EU hosting actually protect against?
It puts the operator, the contract and the hardware under one European jurisdiction, with no third-country access path by default. For labs that want training infrastructure outside other jurisdictions it is a concrete answer rather than a policy statement.
Does running in Europe make our model EU-compliant?
No. Where the hardware sits does not decide what obligations a model carries; those follow the market the model is placed on. Hosting location is an operational and jurisdictional choice, not a compliance shortcut.
Can we run it in our own data centre instead?
Yes, on request. The default is dedicated hardware in the Netherlands because it is faster to stand up and keeps the separation between labs under our control, but a lab that wants the environment inside its own perimeter can have that.