Cloud Provider Regions

Benched.ai Editorial Team

Cloud provider regions are isolated geographic areas where compute, storage, and networking resources operate. Region selection affects latency, data residency, redundancy, and cost for AI workloads.

Major Provider Region Counts (2025)

Provider	Total Regions	AI Accelerator Availability	Notable New Regions
AWS	34	A10G, H100, Trn2 in 12 regions	Tel Aviv, Madrid
Azure	28	MI300X & H100 in 10 regions	Qatar Central
Google Cloud	38	TPU v5p & A3 Mega in 14	Berlin, Johannesburg
Oracle Cloud	46	A100 in 8	Monterrey, Stockholm

Decision Matrix

Requirement	Recommended Region Characteristic	Rationale
Low latency to EU users	Frankfurt, Paris zones	≤30 ms RTT
Strict data residency (Canada)	ca-central-1, northamerica-northeast1	Sovereign cloud compliance
Cheapest GPU spot	us-east-1, us-south1	Highest surplus capacity
Carbon footprint target	Regions >80 % renewable mix	EU-North-1 (hydro)

Design Trade-offs

Newer regions may lag in latest GPU availability.
Cross-region traffic incurs egress fees; multi-region replication raises cost.
Latency savings diminish beyond ≈100 ms vs fine-tuning smaller models closer to users.

Current Trends (2025)

Sovereign "trusted regions" with local legal entities (Azure EU Data Boundary).
Liquid-cooling datacenters enabling high-density H100 clusters in tropical zones.
GPU capacity marketplaces let customers bid on idle accelerators across regions.

Implementation Tips

Benchmark end-to-end latency (TLS + inference) from target user ISPs before committing.
Use multi-region DNS failover to mitigate single-region GPU shortages.
Track per-region carbon intensity and choose greenest viable option.