Support for OpenAI EU Regional Endpoints

[eddial]

Description

Problem

Vercel AI Gateway currently routes all OpenAI requests to api.openai.com, but OpenAI now offers EU data residency via eu.api.openai.com. There's no way to configure AI Gateway to use the EU endpoint, forcing enterprises to choose between Gateway features or GDPR compliance.

Use Case

European enterprise customers require EU data residency for regulatory compliance. This is now a non-negotiable requirement for AI vendor selection in healthcare, finance, and public sector organizations.

Proposed Solution

Option 1: BYOK Configuration with Region Selection

// In Gateway BYOK configuration UI:
{
  provider: "openai",
  apiKey: "sk-...",
  region: "eu" // As we can't set baseURL as we would not hit AI gateway
}

Option 2: Provider Options Extension

// In code via providerOptions:
const result = streamText({
  model: 'openai/gpt-4o',
  prompt: 'Hello',
  providerOptions: {
    openai: {
      region: 'eu'
    },
  }
});

Impact

• Blocking: Enterprise adoption in Europe
• Competitive: First multi-provider gateway to support OpenAI EU endpoints
• Market timing: OpenAI launched EU residency Feb 2025; demand is immediate

References

• OpenAI EU announcement: https://openai.com/index/introducing-data-residency-in-europe/
• Similar capabilities needed for Anthropic's upcoming European expansion

---

This would enable European enterprises to use AI Gateway while maintaining regulatory compliance.

AI SDK Version

latest

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[jithinnath]

You can add OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://eu.api.openai.com in .env

[kevinjosethomas]

I think OPENAI_BASE_URL should work great for single-region setups, but will probably be an issue for multi-tenant use cases. If you're building an app where you need to route EU users to eu.api.openai.com and US users to api.openai.com dynamically based on who's making the request, I think the only solution would be to have two providers (one for each region) and switching between them per-request.

Might be worth having a way to specify the region at the request level, although @ai/google-vertex also defines location on the provider level.

[eddial]

Thanks for your reply. Wouldn't using OPENAI_BASE_URL circumvent the gateway? The point is to use EU residency while still having the advantages like failovers etc.

[willemmulder]

Same applies for e.g. Vertex regions, AWS regions etc.

Or more in general; for many of our customers, the data needs to stay inside the EU, so it would be very useful to be able to tick a 'EU-only' box so that data is only routed to EU endpoints. Would of course need some contractual backup to guarantee data stays in the EU.

[eddial]

@kevinjosethomas any update on this matter. This is becoming an issue for us and I can imagine for many European companies.

[bigbitbus]

+1
Having EU data residency is a requirement to use Vercel AI gateway there. Can someone from the dev team or Vercel comment on the product roadmap for this feature?

[lgrammel]

Identify issue type

{
  "evidence": [
    "The issue requests AI Gateway support for OpenAI's EU endpoint `eu.api.openai.com` instead of always routing OpenAI requests to `api.openai.com`.",
    "The description proposes new configuration options such as BYOK region selection or per-request `providerOptions.openai.region`.",
    "Comments discuss desired dynamic per-request or provider-level regional routing and an “EU-only” option for OpenAI, Vertex, AWS, and similar providers.",
    "Later comments ask for roadmap updates and describe EU data residency as a requirement for using Vercel AI Gateway."
  ],
  "rationale": "This is a request for new regional routing/data residency capabilities in AI Gateway, not a report of broken existing behavior or documentation/examples changes.",
  "type": "feature",
  "confidence": "high"
}