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
The following table lists in which data centers the watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime, and watsonx.governance services are available.
| Service | Dallas | Frankfurt | London | Tokyo | Sydney |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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
| 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 | 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
| 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 Studio | 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
| 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 | Custom models and deploy on demand models are not available. |
| 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
| 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 Studio | 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. |
Regional availability of foundation models
The following table shows the IBM Cloud data centers where you can inference the foundation models that are curated by IBM. A checkmark indicates that the model is hosted in the region.
| Model name | Dallas | Frankfurt | London | Sydney | Tokyo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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-chat-v2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| 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-3-8b-instruct | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| llama-3-70b-instruct | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| llama-2-13b-chat | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| mistral-large | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501 | ✓ | ||||
| mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v01 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| pixtral-12b | ✓ | ✓ |
For information about additional models that you can deploy on demand in Dallas, see Supported foundation models.
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.
| Model name | Dallas | Frankfurt | London | Sydney | Tokyo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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.
| Model | Dallas | Frankfurt | London | Sydney | Tokyo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| all-minilm-l6-v2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| all-minilm-l12-v2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 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 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Learn more
Parent topic: Services and integrations