Which of the smartest models can you run inside the EU, and what is the residency premium?

On 2 September someone in r/AI_Governance posted the question every European platform team eventually has to answer: best AI gateway with EU data sovereignty, what did legal verify? They had started with nine gateways, read every security page, and concluded that "most of them treat EU sovereignty as an enterprise tier conversation" while they needed "traffic staying in EU, subprocessor and auditable, DPA ready to sign" as the bare minimum.

The security page is the wrong place to start. The right place is the model catalog, because the constraint that decides an EU architecture is not the gateway's promise, it is which models exist in an EU region at all and what they cost there. So we ran the check: take the Requesty Intelligence ranking, which orders models by the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and look each of the top 16 up in the live catalog for a deployment flagged geolocation: eu.

The table

Prices are per million tokens. "Global" is the price shown on the ranking page. "EU" is the cheapest EU region deployment in the catalog on 10 September 2026, blended 3:1 input to output for the premium column.

Three things fall out of it.

The frontier is available in the EU, with one large exception. Anthropic's entire current line, including the number one model on the ranking, runs in EU regions through Vertex and Bedrock, 47 deployments across six regions at last count. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family and GPT-5.5 run on Azure in four EU regions. Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash runs on Vertex EU. The exception is GPT-6 Astra, which a week after launch has no EU region deployment anywhere in the catalog. We covered why Astra is not production ready for European teams last week; the ranking makes the cost concrete. If your organisation is EU only, the smartest model you can call is Fable 5.1 at 53.4, and the second smartest is Opus 5 at 50.7, not Astra at 52.8.

The residency premium is 10%, and it is the vendors' number, not ours. Ten of the thirteen EU capable models cost exactly 10% more in their EU region than the global list price: Anthropic on Bedrock and Vertex, OpenAI on Azure, Google on Vertex. OpenAI's own data residency documentation states that "data residency endpoints are charged a 10% uplift for models released on or after March 5, 2026." The hyperscalers apply the same uplift to their EU regions. Budget for it as a line item: an EU only organisation pays 1.1x on the frontier models, and the gateway does not add to that.

Sol's 55% is a promo artefact worth understanding. GPT-5.6 Sol's global price of $4 and $20 is a promotional rate that OpenAI labelled as available at least through 21 November; Azure's EU regions bill Sol at $5.50 and $33, a 10% uplift on the pre-promo $5 and $30. So the EU premium on Sol today is "promo versus no promo plus 10%". We wrote about list prices that depend on the calendar last week; this is the EU version of the same problem. When the promo ends, Sol's EU premium drops back to 10%.

The open weight rows behave differently, and that is the point of open weights. GLM-5.3 is cheaper on its EU flagged hosts than the global list price, Kimi K3 and the Qwen3.8 family are at parity, and GLM-5.3 Flash carries a small premium on one host. Open weights let European hosts compete on price for the same model, and the provider variance that is a headache elsewhere is a discount here.

The cheapest models you can run in the EU

The cheapest models ranking is global. Filter the same catalog to EU flagged deployments and rank by blended 3:1 price, and the EU budget tier on 10 September looks like this:

Two of these deserve a second look against the intelligence ranking. GLM-5.3 Flash scores 41.9, above Gemini 3.8 Flash and one place below Opus 4.8, at $0.20 in and $0.50 out in an EU region. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is a 1M context model at $0.25 and $0.30. Both are the kind of model you route the 80% of traffic that does not need a frontier answer to, and both exist in Europe.

What "in the catalog" means and does not mean

A note on rigour, because the r/AI_Governance poster's complaint was that vendor pages overstate. The geolocation: eu flag in the Requesty catalog records where the model inference runs, as declared by the host: Bedrock and Vertex regions in the model id, Azure regions in the model id, Mistral's La Plateforme in the EU, and EU flagged third party hosts for open weights. It says nothing about where the gateway processed the request. Those are two separate layers, and confusing them is the most common EU compliance mistake we see. The EU routing documentation spells it out: the EU endpoint at router.eu.requesty.ai guarantees that Requesty's processing, logging and caching stay in Frankfurt (AWS eu-central-1); an EU region model guarantees the inference stays in the EU; you need both for end to end residency.

Also: the table is a snapshot from 10 September 2026. Catalog entries change weekly. The /eu/claude, /eu/openai, /eu/gemini and /eu/mistral pages render the same EU rows live from the catalog, so use those for the current list rather than this post.

Making the EU column the only column

The table above tells you what is possible. Turning "possible" into "enforced" is three settings, none of which require code:

1. Restrict the serving region. In the Compliance panel, set the organisation's allowed Requesty region to EU. Every request now has to enter through router.eu.requesty.ai; the global, US and AP endpoints reject the organisation's keys, and the Playground only offers EU.
2. Build the Approved Models list from EU regions only. Filter the Model Library by EU regions, select, approve. A request for anthropic/claude-opus-5 (the global route) is rejected; bedrock/claude-opus-5@eu-central-1 succeeds. This is the control that stops inference leaving the EU by accident, and it is what the r/AI_Governance poster meant by "enforced, not listed".
3. Turn on Zero Data Retention if the requirement is that prompts and responses are never stored. ZDR is organisation wide and one way: once enabled it disables payload logging on every key and blocks anyone, including admins, from turning it back on.

Then use access lists per team to narrow further: a support automation key that may only call Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite in Belgium, an engineering key that may call Opus 5 in Frankfurt. The team model access post walks through the layering.

For the paperwork, the DPA covers GDPR Article 28 processor obligations and the EU residency commitments, and turns around in a few business days.

The takeaway

Thirteen of the sixteen smartest models in the world have an EU region today, at a 10% premium set by the model vendors rather than by the routing layer. The three that do not (GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6, Qwen3.8 Max) are the honest limit of an EU only architecture in September 2026, and the honest answer to "can we use Astra" for a European regulated team is "not yet, use Fable 5.1 or Opus 5."

Everything below the frontier is better than people assume: a budget tier of open weight and small proprietary models exists in Europe at prices that match or beat the global cheapest ranking. What turns that catalog into compliance is enforcement at the organisation level: EU serving region, EU only approved models, ZDR. Start at the /eu page, or sign up and point your base URL at Frankfurt.