EU-hosted AI tools.
Without compromising on capability.
EU hosting has moved from a procurement preference to a baseline requirement for many European teams. The reasons are concrete: Schrems II, the US Cloud Act, and the simple operational fact that round-tripping every prompt to North America has both legal and latency costs. Namulai is built around an EU-first data plane, with the trade-offs named rather than buried.
The EU-hosting landscape in 2026
The market has bifurcated. On one side, the major US-headquartered AI vendors offer EU-region endpoints for their core models, sometimes behind enterprise plans, sometimes as a default. On the other side, a small set of EU-native providers, Mistral being the most visible, run inference entirely on European infrastructure but with a narrower model catalogue.
The practical question is no longer whether EU hosting is available. It is whether a single tool can give you a credible EU posture across the breadth of models you actually want to use. That is where most current options still fall short, and where Namulai sits as a deliberate compromise.
Schrems II, the Cloud Act, and latency
The Court of Justice invalidated Privacy Shield in July 2020 in case C-311/18, known as Schrems II, because US surveillance law did not provide protections equivalent to those afforded under EU law. The 2023 EU-US Data Privacy Framework restored a transfer mechanism, but it remains contested and may yet be challenged in court.
In parallel, the US Cloud Act allows US authorities to compel disclosure from US-headquartered providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. Hosting on EU soil with an EU-headquartered operator is not a panacea, but it materially narrows the surface area. Latency is the smaller, more mundane benefit: fewer milliseconds per token when the inference endpoint sits in the same region as your users.
How Namulai is hosted
The application servers and the primary database run on Hetzner CX-class instances in Falkenstein, Germany. MongoDB is co-located on the same VM rather than spread across cloud regions, which keeps the data plane simple and auditable. Backups are encrypted archives on the same machine, with off-site replication on the roadmap for the next quarter.
Inference is routed through OpenRouter. For models where the underlying provider exposes an EU-region endpoint, Namulai prefers that endpoint. Stripe handles billing through Stripe Payments Europe Ltd., based in Dublin, with PCI-DSS Level 1 attestation. Email transactional traffic goes through an EU-region provider, listed in the subprocessor inventory available on request.
Which models still route through US infrastructure
Some of the eight models Namulai exposes are only served from US-based provider infrastructure today. When you select one of those models, the prompt and completion transit US endpoints for the duration of that single request, under Standard Contractual Clauses.
The model picker exposes the routing region so you can make the choice deliberately. If your work is bound by client agreements that require strict EU residency, you can constrain yourself to the EU-routed subset, which still covers the vast majority of general-purpose tasks. If your work is internal and the priority is raw capability, you have the full catalogue available. We would rather give you the choice than silently route everything through whichever endpoint is cheapest.
When EU-only is non-negotiable
There are categories of work where EU residency is not a preference but a contract clause. Public-sector procurement under the EU Cloud Code of Conduct. Healthcare data under national implementations of GDPR Art. 9. Legal files subject to professional secrecy under Bar regulations. Defence and dual-use research.
For those cases, the right approach is to scope your Namulai usage to the EU-routed models, document that scope in your DPIA, and treat the US-routed models as off-limits for the relevant data categories. The subprocessor list and the routing indicators are designed to make that scoping straightforward to operationalise inside a small or mid-sized team.
EU hosting, common questions
Where exactly is the primary database?
MongoDB runs on a Hetzner CX-class instance in the Falkenstein region of Germany. It listens on the loopback interface only and is reached by the application server, which runs on the same VM, through localhost. There is no public database endpoint and no cross-region replica today.
Which models are routed through EU infrastructure?
The set varies as providers expand their regional coverage, so we surface the current routing region in the model picker rather than freeze it in a static list. Mistral is fully EU-served. Several others have EU-region endpoints that we prefer when available. The remainder still route through US endpoints under Standard Contractual Clauses.
Do you use AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure?
No, not for the application or the database. The primary data plane is on Hetzner, an EU-headquartered operator. Stripe is the exception, since payment processing necessarily touches their infrastructure, and they operate the EU service through Stripe Payments Europe Ltd. in Dublin under their own EU residency arrangements.
Can I restrict my account to EU-routed models only?
Not yet through a single account toggle. The model picker shows the routing region per model, so the practical workaround is to limit your selections to the EU-routed subset. A hard account-level restriction is on the roadmap and is the kind of feature we will ship once the underlying provider coverage stabilises further.
An EU-first AI workspace, with the trade-offs on the table rather than under it.
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