OpenAI is to offer the option of U.K. data residency while expanding its partnership with the British government.

The data residency arrangement will apply from October 24 to the AI giant’s API platform, ChatGPT Enterprise, and ChatGPT Edu platforms. In its announcement, OpenAI touted the move as giving British users and developers the choice to keep their data stored locally in the U.K. and meet regulatory requirements.

The ChatGPT maker said the Ministry of Justice will be the first customer to benefit from the arrangement as part of the government's AI Action Plan for Justice. Some 2,500 employees will be granted access to ChatGPT Enterprise following a pilot, which OpenAI claimed provided productive benefits for the unit.

The ChatGPT tool will work alongside customized OpenAI tools such as Humphrey and Consult, AI assistants currently being used by civil servants for administrative and public records purposes, including in the British government’s central department, the Cabinet Office.

According to a government webpage published in May, data from the Consult application is processed inside the Cabinet Office in dedicated AWS and Azure environments, which host all manner of officially sensitive data.

OpenAI’s global-focused data residency page notes that some data may be stored outside of a data residency region, including connectors and model context protocol use, third-party services, and workspace metadata.

Beta and alpha features are also not covered under OpenAI rules, alongside third-party GPTs and Apple Intelligence. The latter applies globally, but Apple has been embroiled in a row with the British government over a mandated backdoor into its encryption service.

The move came as the country’s security-led Home Office division has demanded that Apple provide access to encrypted data and messages of U.K. users stored on its iCloud service.

With the new deal, the U.K. joins Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UAE as data residency markets for OpenAI, alongside nations in Asia such as India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

British data sovereignty comes as part of a wider European drive toward data residency. Cisco, SAP, SUSE, Microsoft, OVHcloud, Exoscale, and more have all recently invested in EU-compliant solutions, as the EU Data Act kicked into gear last month to weaken vendor lock-in for Europe's cloud customers.

OpenAI’s friendly relations with the U.K. government add to its increasing investments in Britain, including the Stargate UK deal, an AI infrastructure partnership between OpenAI, Nvidia, and Nscale billed as bolstering the U.K.’s sovereign compute capabilities.

Nscale plans to invest some $3 billion in Britain as part of the venture, with its first facility set to be located in Loughton, Essex, and Nokia providing network capabilities.