Glossary
Data residency is the oldest of the sovereign-AI requirements and the one most often misjudged. The label sounds like a deployment toggle ("select region"), but the actual obligation tracks every transformation of customer data — including transformations the customer cannot directly see, like a third-party embedding API hit.
Back to glossaryA traditional database has one residency point: where the bytes sit at rest. A modern AI agent has at least seven: prompt staging, retrieval against a vector store, embedding generation, model inference, tool/API call-out, response post-processing, and audit logging. Any one of them can quietly egress data through a third-party endpoint or a hyperscaler default region, breaking the regulator's residency assumption.
A defensible AI residency posture binds three concrete properties. Compute residency: model weights are loaded into hardware physically in the chosen region. Memory residency: retrieval corpora, vector stores, and ephemeral context never leave the region — including replicas and backups. Audit residency: the evidence trail (which receipt was issued, who saw it, when) is captured, signed, and stored inside the same perimeter.
Operators commonly miss the third. "Our data is in Mumbai" is a partial answer if the audit logs replicate to a US observability vendor.
Self-declaration is no longer enough. Two primitives close the gap: hardware attestation (AWS Nitro, Azure Confidential VM, GCP Confidential Space, Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP) verifies that compute happened on attested silicon in the claimed region; per-call signed receipts make every transformation auditable after the fact. Together they let a regulator verify residency without trusting the operator's narrative.
Where the regulatory or technical authority for this term actually lives. We cite primary sources so this entry can be checked, not just trusted.
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We maintain canonical definitions for sovereign AI, Trust Receipts, data residency, AgentBOM, and agentic AI so procurement, security, and legal teams can quote a primary source instead of paraphrasing one. Email enterprise@soverai.ai if you need an extended PDF reference for a specific regulator.