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Regional availability for services and features on IBM Cloud
Last updated: Feb 13, 2025
Regional availability for services and features on IBM Cloud

IBM watsonx is deployed on the IBM Cloud multi-zone region network. The availability of services and features can vary across regional data centers.

View the regional availability for every service in the Services catalog.

Regional availability of the watsonx services

IBM watsonx as a Service is available in the following regional data centers:

  • Dallas (us-south), in Texas US
  • Frankfurt (eu-de), in Germany
  • London (eu-gb), in England
  • Tokyo (jp-tok), in Japan
  • Sydney (au-syd), in Australia
  • Toronto (ca-tor), in Canada

The following table lists in which data centers the watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime, and watsonx.governance services are available.

Regional deployments by service
Service Dallas Frankfurt London Tokyo Sydney Toronto
watsonx.ai Studio
watsonx.ai Runtime
watsonx.governance

Regional availability of the Cloud Object Storage service

The region for the Cloud Object Storage service is Global. Cloud Object Storage buckets for workspaces are Regional buckets. For more information, see IBM Cloud docs: Cloud Object Storage endpoints and storage locations.

Tool and environment limitations for the Frankfurt region

Frankfurt regional limitations
Service Limitation
watsonx.ai Studio If you need a Spark runtime, you must use the Spark environment in watsonx.ai Studio for the notebook editor tools.
watsonx.ai Runtime Custom models and deploy on demand models are not available.
watsonx.governance Only one instance per region is supported.

 

Tool and environment limitations for the London region

London regional limitations
Service Limitation
watsonx.ai Studio If you need a Spark runtime, you must use the Spark environment in watsonx.ai Studio for the notebook editor tools.
watsonx.ai Studio IBM Orchestration Pipelines is not available.
watsonx.ai Runtime Custom models and deploy on demand models are not available.
watsonx.governance Evaluation Studio is not available.
watsonx.governance Tuned model evaluations are not available.

 

Tool and environment limitations for the Sydney region

Sydney regional limitations
Service Limitation
watsonx.ai Studio RStudio is not available.
watsonx.ai Studio If you need a Spark runtime, you must use the Spark environment in watsonx.ai Studio for the notebook editor tools.
watsonx.ai Studio If you use the watsonx.ai Runtime API to run Decision Optimization jobs, you must first create a User API key.
watsonx.governance No support for integration with Governance console
watsonx.governance Only one instance per region is supported.

 

Tool and environment limitations for the Tokyo region

Tokyo regional limitations
Service Limitation
watsonx.ai Studio If you need a Spark runtime, you must use the Spark environment in watsonx.ai Studio for the notebook editor tools.
watsonx.ai Studio Multibyte characters are not supported in user-input fields in Data Refinery. Some fields allow multibyte characters but do not display them correctly.
watsonx.ai Studio IBM Orchestration Pipelines is not available.
watsonx.ai Runtime Custom models and deploy on demand models are not available.
watsonx.governance Evaluation Studio is not available.
watsonx.governance Tuned model evaluations are not available.

 

Tool and environment limitations for the Toronto region

Toronto regional limitations
Service Limitation
watsonx.ai Studio RStudio is not available.
watsonx.ai Runtime Tuning Studio is not available.
watsonx.governance Evaluation Studio is not available.
watsonx.governance Tuned model evaluations are not available.

 

Regional availability of provided foundation models

The following table shows the IBM Cloud data centers where you can inference the foundation models that are provided by IBM. A checkmark indicates that the model is hosted in the region.

IBM Cloud data center support for inferencing foundation models provided by IBM
Model name Dallas Frankfurt London Sydney Tokyo Toronto
allam-1-13b-instruct
codellama-34b-instruct-hf
elyza-japanese-llama-2-7b-instruct
flan-t5-xl-3b
flan-t5-xxl-11b
flan-ul2-20b
granite-13b-instruct-v2
granite-8b-japanese
granite-20b-multilingual
granite-3-2b-instruct
granite-3-8b-instruct
granite-guardian-3-2b
granite-guardian-3-8b
granite-3b-code-instruct
granite-8b-code-instruct
granite-20b-code-instruct
granite-34b-code-instruct
jais-13b-chat
llama-3-3-70b-instruct
llama-3-2-1b-instruct
llama-3-2-3b-instruct
llama-3-2-11b-vision-instruct
llama-3-2-90b-vision-instruct
llama-guard-3-11b-vision
llama-3-1-8b-instruct
llama-3-1-70b-instruct
llama-3-405b-instruct
llama-3-70b-instruct
llama-2-13b-chat
mistral-large
mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501
mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v01
pixtral-12b

 

Regional availability of deploy on demand foundation models

The following table shows the IBM Cloud data centers where you can deploy foundation models on-demand for the dedicated use of your organization. A checkmark indicates that the model is hosted in the region.

IBM Cloud data center support for deploy on demand foundation models provided by IBM
Model name Dallas Sydney Toronto
granite-3-8b-base
granite-7b-lab
granite-13b-chat-v2
granite-13b-instruct-v2
granite-8b-code-instruct
granite-20b-code-instruct
granite-34b-code-instruct
granite-20b-code-base-schema-linking
granite-20b-code-base-sql-gen
deepseek-r1-distill-llama-8b
deepseek-r1-distill-llama-70b
flan-t5-xl-3b
flan-t5-xxl-11b
flan-ul2-20b
llama-2-13b-chat
llama-2-70b-chat
llama-3-8b-instruct
llama-3-70b-instruct
llama-3-1-8b
llama-3-1-8b-instruct
llama-3-1-70b-instruct
llama-3-3-70b-instruct
llama-3-3-70b-instruct-hf
mistral-large-instruct-2407
mistral-large-instruct-2411
mistral-nemo-instruct-2407
mixtral-8x7b-base
mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v01
mt0-xxl-13b

Regional availability of foundation model tuning

The following table shows the IBM Cloud data centers where tuning the foundation model is supported. A checkmark indicates that you can use the Tuning Studio to tune the foundation model in the region.

IBM Cloud data center support for foundation model tuning
Model name Dallas Frankfurt London Sydney Tokyo Toronto
flan-t5-xl-3b
granite-13b-instruct-v2

Regional availability of encoder-only models

The following table shows the IBM Cloud data centers where embedding models and reranker models are available. A checkmark indicates that you can use the model in the region.

IBM Cloud data center support for encoder-only models
Model Dallas Frankfurt London Sydney Tokyo Toronto
all-minilm-l6-v2
all-minilm-l12-v2
granite-embedding-107m-multilingual
granite-embedding-278m-multilingual
ms-marco-minilm-l-12-v2
multilingual-e5-large
slate.125m.english.rtrvr-v2
slate.125m.english.rtrvr
slate.30m.english.rtrvr-v2
slate.30m.english.rtrvr

 

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Parent topic: Services and integrations