Your data can sit in Europe and still reach Washington

Last month, Microsoft handed the unredacted names of Dutch civil servants to the US House of Representatives. The people named worked at ACM, the Dutch competition authority, and AP, the Dutch data protection authority. Their job was to enforce the EU's Digital Services Act, a law the US has cast as a form of censorship. Microsoft shared their emails, meeting minutes and calendar invitations, with names intact.

It happened under the US CLOUD Act. That 2018 law requires American companies to hand data to US authorities even when the data is stored on European servers, in European datacentres, under European contracts. The location of the hardware did not matter. The nationality of the company holding it did.

"Your data stays in Europe" turns out not to mean what most people assume it means.

This is the exact scenario Pendra exists to prevent. We are sovereign UK inference infrastructure: owned by a UK entity, operated by UK personnel, processing UK data on UK soil, outside the reach of the CLOUD Act. Zero retention by design. And the same OpenAI-compatible API your team is already using.

For any UK organisation building with AI, the Dutch story is your story, just one CLOUD Act request away. If that is a risk you would rather not carry, get in touch, or browse the models you can run on Pendra today.