Mana motuhake raraunga · Data sovereignty
Sovereignty is about jurisdiction, not just location.
Where your data physically sits matters. Who has legal power over the company holding it matters just as much — and that is the part the global providers cannot change for you.
The CLOUD Act gap
A foreign-owned provider is subject to the law of its home country wherever its data centres are. Under the United States CLOUD Act, for example, a US company can be compelled to produce data it controls — even data held in an offshore region — without the data leaving that region and, in some cases, without the customer being told.
"Hosted in a New Zealand region" does not close this gap if the operator is foreign-owned. New Zealand ownership does. A genuinely NZ-owned operator is outside that foreign legal reach by construction.
This is why we lead with ownership, not just hosting region. It is the one structural advantage an offshore incumbent cannot match by adding a local data centre.
How we make sovereignty enforceable
Policy that is enforced in code
Sovereignty isn't a checkbox in a contract here — it's a policy the control plane enforces on every request. A tenant set to nz_sovereign can only ever reach NZ-located, NZ-owned systems.
Fail-closed, not best-effort
If no compliant system is available, the request is refused. There is no silent fallback offshore. The safe default is to stop, not to leak.
Proof you can hand to a regulator
Each request produces an attestation of where it was processed and the ownership of that system — an artifact your own auditors and regulators can rely on.
Independence you can audit
We route on the merits — residency, health, cost — and log the decision. You are not quietly steered toward one provider's models.
Māori data sovereignty
Data sovereignty in Aotearoa is not only a question of national jurisdiction. Māori data sovereignty — the right of Māori to govern the collection, ownership, and use of data about Māori, their whenua, and their taonga — is a distinct and important principle, articulated by Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network.
We take this seriously rather than tokenistically. Keeping data on NZ soil and under NZ ownership is a necessary foundation; we are committed to engaging authentically with iwi and Māori organisations on how a sovereign AI service should respect kaitiakitanga over their data. We would rather have that conversation properly than make a hollow statement here.
Talk to us about your sovereignty requirements.
Bring your specific obligations — Privacy Act, sector rules, panel requirements, iwi data agreements — and we will map them to an enforceable residency policy.