[AnonymousPlanet]

Cost isn't the only incentive not to use an LLM service that resides in a foreign country. Around here, there are industries for which it's pretty much a no-brainer to avoid anything that sends data across the atlantic.

[unoti]

Although it wouldn't surprise me if today's Azure OpenAI offerings route to certain US-centric regions, I'd be very surprised if Azure isn't working day and night to try to provision OpenAI capacity everywhere they can in the world.

(Disclaimer: I work in the cloud organization at Microsoft, and these are totally my own thoughts and opinions and don't reflect any kind of inside knowledge I have. I think I can say that provisioning LLM capacity and GPU's is something we basically all have a tremendous amount of passion about.)

[AnonymousPlanet]

Let's say a French company would offer the same service in the US, swearing no data would be ever siphoned out of the US and no French intelligence service would be allowed to review the data. Would you be comfortable with your patient records being stored there or the business secrets of US companies?

Do you believe Microsoft can actually make the same promises and keep them? You don't have to answer the last question, of course, but please think about it. It doesn't matter where the LLM is located but who controls it and who holds the resulting data.

[ozgune]

I don't think this is a promise Microsoft can make. The US Cloud Act states that Microsoft falls under US jurisdiction and it's legally bound to share foreign data if asked by US law enforcement.

"The CLOUD Act asserts that U.S. data and communication companies must provide stored data for a customer or subscriber on any server they own and operate when requested by warrant, but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

[fomine3]

Worldwide big corps already utilized Microsoft 365 especially SharePoint. That's Microsoft's advantage.

[carom]

I do think large tech companies do pretty well with customer data. As a former Googler I would be comfortable with my Gmail data residing in a foreign datacenter.

[Aerbil313]

They do pretty well, except the Room_641A in the building which is allowed to do anything they what with production branch without it being visible to ordinary workers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[deet]

Azure GPT 4 is already available in: Australia East, Canada East, East US, East US 2, France Central, Japan East, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UK South (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/c...)