# Language models on European infrastructure: coreAI now runs AI in the EU

coreAI can now run language models on European hardware and infrastructure through a deal with OpenRouter. This means the AI request itself – the question and the content it answers from – is processed by providers within the EU/EEA, not on servers in the US. For anyone with Norwegian or European privacy requirements, this removes one of the hardest trade-offs in adopting AI.

![Comparison of global and European AI security: where the language models run and how the data is processed within the EU/EEA](/articles/european-ai-infrastructure-global-vs-europe.webp)

## What does European infrastructure mean in practice?

European infrastructure means the language model runs on data centres and hardware physically located in the EU/EEA, and that requests are routed there through OpenRouter's European endpoint. coreAI then sends the call to `eu.openrouter.ai` instead of the global endpoint, and OpenRouter forwards it only to providers that offer the model on European infrastructure.

In practice we distinguish between three layers, and all three matter for privacy:

- your knowledge base and search index, which already sit on Norwegian infrastructure
- the embeddings model that vectorises the content
- the language model that formulates the answer itself

It's the last layer – the language model – that previously most often sat outside Europe. With European infrastructure the entire chain stays within the EU/EEA for the models available there.

## A simple choice per knowledge base

You decide per knowledge base which infrastructure the model runs on, where available. The choice is a simple setting on the knowledge base – not a development project – so you can run one knowledge base on European infrastructure and another on global, depending on how sensitive the content is.

Not every model is available on European hardware yet. For the models that are, European infrastructure appears as an available option; for those that aren't, you fall back to the global option. So you always see what is actually possible for the model you've chosen, and can choose deliberately.

## GDPR, data storage and no training

For the European providers, requests run under Zero Data Retention (ZDR): your content is not stored after the answer is delivered, and it is not used to train the models. The combination of data processing within the EU/EEA, no storage and no training is what makes the setup GDPR-friendly.

Concretely, ZDR means a request is processed in memory to generate the answer and then discarded. There is no log of the content itself at the model provider, and nothing you send in ends up in a training dataset. The data responsibility and control remain with you.

## Guaranteed European hardware – but not always European ownership

It is guaranteed that the language models run in Europe on European hardware, but the company that owns the hardware may in some cases still be US-owned. The distinction is between where the computation happens – always within the EU/EEA – and who owns the data centre it happens in.

For the open models, execution can happen on European hardware without the owner being a US company; there you get both European data processing and European ownership. The closed models from the major providers, however, run on the providers' own data centres: the GPT models run on OpenAI's European data centres, for example, and the Gemini models on Google's. The computation then happens in Europe, but ownership of the hardware still lies with a US company.

OpenRouter, which routes the requests onward, is also a US-owned company. What we guarantee is that the European models are processed within the EU/EEA under ZDR and without training on your data – regardless of who owns the hardware behind it.

We consider this good enough for the vast majority of use cases: as long as requests are processed in the EU/EEA, not stored and not used for training, the practical privacy risks are small – even when the hardware is owned by a US company. If you also need European ownership of the hardware, you choose one of the open models that run with European providers.

## How to get started

Choose European infrastructure on the relevant knowledge base where the option is available, and requests are automatically routed through Europe. To see how the knowledge base fits with the rest of the solution, see the [knowledge base solution](https://coreai.no/en/solutions/knowledge-base) or [get in touch for a walkthrough](https://coreai.no/en/contact).