Best for: EU Data Residency
Ranked on EU-region availability, GDPR posture, and price. European customers with data-residency requirements first.
Updated May 2026. Top 3 this month: R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.
Podium
How we rank
Many EU enterprise buyers have contractual data-residency requirements that rule out models without an EU region. We rank based on availability of EU-hosted inference endpoints, GDPR SCCs, and price. Model quality matters but residency is the gating criterion.
Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Pillars and weights:
Full ranking
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | R1 0528 | DeepSeek | $0.50 | $2.15 | 163,840 |
| 2 | Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15 | Qwen | $0.26 | $1.56 | 1,000,000 |
| 3 | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | $0.32 | $0.89 | 163,840 |
| 4 | Qwen3.5 397B A17B | Qwen | $0.39 | $2.34 | 262,144 |
| 5 | Hunyuan A13B Instruct | Tencent | $0.14 | $0.57 | 131,072 |
| 6 | MiniMax M2.1 | MiniMax | $0.29 | $0.95 | 196,608 |
| 7 | Trinity Large Preview | Arcee AI | $0.00 | $0.00 | 131,000 |
| 8 | GPT-4o (2024-11-20) | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128,000 |
| 9 | MiniMax-01 | MiniMax | $0.20 | $1.10 | 1,000,192 |
| 10 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,000,000 |
Field notes
Verify the underlying compute region, not just the API endpoint region.
Check the provider's sub-processor list for GDPR transfers outside the EU.
Consider open-weight self-hosted options if compliance is extreme.
FAQ
The questions teams ask before picking a model for eu data residency.
Get instant answers from our AI agent
