EU data residency means audio, transcripts, model inference and metadata are stored and processed exclusively in EU data centres — no third-country routing, no backups outside the EU.
After the Schrems II ruling (2020), transferring personal data to the US is only permitted under strict additional conditions. For regulated verticals (health, legal, public sector), EU residency is therefore a hard requirement in practice. Frameworks like the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (2023) help but can be invalidated by the CJEU at any time.
When evaluating a vendor, the primary data centre is not enough: the full chain matters — language models, STT/TTS providers, logging and backups. The claim only holds when every sub-processor sits inside the EU.