European teams building with LLMs face a question that did not exist a few years ago: where do you actually run inference? US options fall into two camps, proprietary-model providers like OpenAI, and recently open-source inference platforms like Together AI or Fireworks that serve more affordable open-weight models. Both are fast and competitively priced, but routing sensitive data through US infrastructure raises GDPR and data-residency concerns. A growing set of European providers now offer an alternative for running open-source models inside the EU, but they differ widely in focus, pricing model, and what they actually host.
This article compares the main options for running open-source model inference inside the EU, what each is best at, and where each falls short.
Quick answer:
If you want a one-line version: for serverless, pay-per-token inference on open-source models with EU data residency, the most direct options are Lyceum, Scaleway, IONOS, and STACKIT. For a managed, single-vendor model family, Mistral. The rest of this article explains the trade-offs.
What to look for in an EU inference provider
