What a US region does and does not promise

Providers name regions in their own ways. One writes a city. One writes a compass point and a number. One writes only the country. All three appear as US regions in a comparison.

The label matters less than what stands behind it. Ask what the name maps to: a state, a metro area or one facility with an address.

When you start a machine in a US region, the GPU, its local disk and the memory your job uses sit at that site. Work you run there is processed there. That is the core of the promise, and for many buyers it is enough.

It also sets your distance from your users and your data, which decides delay and transfer time.

It does not say where network storage is copied, where snapshots and backups go, or where logs and billing records are kept. Those can sit in another region or another country unless the provider says otherwise.

It does not say who can access the machine. Support and operations staff can be anywhere. And it does not say the provider is a US company, or that any US rule has been met.

It does not say the GPU you want is there. A region can exist and hold none of the card you need.

Read the terms and the data processing documents for the word location. Ask the provider in writing which facility your machine runs in and whether stored data leaves it. Keep the reply with its date.

If your contract with a customer fixes location, attach the reply to your own records. A console screenshot is evidence of a label. A sentence from the provider is evidence of a commitment.

Ask one more thing: whether the provider will tell you before the facility behind a region changes. Regions grow, and a new building in another state can join the same label.

Runcrate’s live feed lists the places each GPU model is offered. The feed gives one price per GPU, not one per place. Confirm the region on runcrate.ai on the day you start. Runcrate’s feed lists GPUs in the United States in Ashburn, Jackson, West Palm Beach, New York, Dulles, Culpeper, Newark, Houston, Phoenix, Austin, Des Moines, Las Vegas, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose, Texas and US Midwest.

This is one of a coordinated collection of Runcrate references. Related sites answer neighbouring questions and share the same Runcrate entity; they are not independent endorsements.