Exa rebuilt its web index and retrieval stack in Stockholm so EU customers can run search without data ever leaving the region.
- Exa launched EU data residency, running its full search stack in AWS Stockholm (eu-north-1 ).
- The main web index was replicated across continents, with routers, vector DBs, and GPUs all in-region.
- Benchmark scores match US endpoints within 3 points, and EU users save over 100ms of latency.
- Region-locked API keys refuse US fallback, and responses include an
x-exa-processing-regionaudit header. - Search and Contents APIs are live now; Agents, Websets, and Monitors coming later.
- Available to enterprise customers via a new EU team provisioned through Exa sales.
Exa has launched a European deployment of its AI search engine, allowing enterprise customers to process queries, fetch page contents, and store results within the EU. The service runs in AWS Stockholm (eu-north-1) and is available through the new api.eu.exa.ai endpoint, according to the EU launch post.
The release targets organizations whose procurement, security, or GDPR requirements prevent queries from reaching a US-hosted service. Europe already accounts for a substantial share of Exa’s API traffic, and customers had requested a regional deployment.
The index lives in Stockholm #
Exa copied its main web index into the EU and says it maintains petabytes of data across both regions in real time. API routing, vector databases, model inference, reranking, highlights, and page retrieval all run through infrastructure in Stockholm.
Keeping two search regions aligned requires more than copying stored pages. Crawlers must feed both indexes, embeddings must produce consistent numerical representations of content, and rerankers must order results similarly. Drift in any component can change which pages users receive.
EU quality stays close to US #
Exa evaluated both regions with the same benchmark suite. The largest published difference was 2.8 percentage points on ATLAS for Exa Auto, while other benchmarks showed differences ranging from 0 to 2.4 percentage points. Exa also reports that European users reduced request latency by more than 100 milliseconds when querying the Stockholm endpoint.
| Exa’s published auto search results. Delta is EU minus US. | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark | US auto |
EU auto |
Delta |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
deep-search-qa (F1) |
0.876 | 0.880 | +0.004 |
| ATLAS benchmark | 0.497 | 0.469 | -0.028 |
live-browsecomp |
0.556 | 0.560 | +0.004 |
finsearchcomp |
0.655 | 0.655 | 0.000 |
auto search results. Delta is EU minus US.
Keys cannot cross regions #
Exa enforces residency through account, endpoint, and response-level controls designed to prevent requests from reaching another region:
- Region-bound keys. API keys assigned to an EU team work only with the EU endpoint. A misconfigured client receives an error.
- Rejected unsupported calls. The endpoint refuses unavailable features before metering them and does not retry requests in another region.
- Auditable responses. Every response includes the
x-exa-processing-region: euheader, which identifies where the request was processed. - Zero retention by default. EU teams start with request-content retention disabled.
The residency boundary has a documented exception: account and identity metadata, along with aggregated service metrics, may be stored outside the EU. Organizations whose policies cover user identifiers should include that exception in their security review and data-processing agreement.
The first release has limits #
The EU region currently supports the Search and Contents APIs, with auto and lite search types. Exa plans to add more search types, followed by Agents, Websets, and Monitors. Applications that depend on those products cannot yet move their full workload into the region.
After Exa provisions an EU team, Python clients need the regional API key and base URL:
from exa_py import Exa
exa = Exa(
api_key="YOUR_EU_KEY",
base_url="https://api.eu.exa.ai",
)
results = exa.search(
"EU AI Act obligations for model providers",
type="auto",
)
Residency clears blocked workloads #
Exa has a direct commercial incentive to expand in Europe after reporting a $100M run rate. EU data residency has also become a standard procurement requirement for AI vendors selling to banks, legal firms, healthcare companies, and other organizations that handle personal or regulated data. OpenAI, Anthropic, and major cloud providers have introduced similar regional controls.
Developers building agents and retrieval-augmented generation systems can now keep European search traffic within the region while retaining Exa’s existing API shape and comparable benchmark performance. The regional endpoint can replace separately maintained EU search indexes and US-bound query paths, provided the current feature set and metadata exception meet the organization’s requirements.