AWS enables cross-Region access to OpenAI models from Canada

<p>Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Canadian organizations can now access a suite of OpenAI foundation models—including the GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 families—through Amazon Bedrock using cross-Region inference (CRIS). This development allows users in the Canada (Central) and Canada West (Calgary) Regions to leverage broader capacity pools for generative AI applications without needing to manage complex destination routing.</p><h2>Expanding access to foundation models</h2><p>The models now available through this capability include the GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, and Luna), GPT-6 (Astra, Sol, and Luna), and GPT-6.1 (Sol) series. Each model is positioned for specific use cases, ranging from high-performance coding and complex reasoning tasks to cost-effective, high-volume operations. These models support multi-modal inputs, tool calling, and a 1-million-token context window.</p><p>By using inference profiles, developers can route requests to supported destination Regions. AWS provides two profile types: "US geographic," which confines processing to North America (Canada and the U.S.) to meet specific data-residency preferences, and "Global," which accesses a wider range of AWS Regions to ensure service availability during demand spikes.</p><h2>Implementation and governance</h2><p>The integration is accessible via the OpenAI Responses API, the OpenAI Chat Completions API, and the Amazon Bedrock Converse API. AWS has designed the system to integrate with existing observability tools, meaning that despite the processing occurring in a destination Region, logs and CloudWatch metrics remain accessible within the user's source Region in Canada.</p><p>For organizations with strict governance requirements, AWS emphasizes that data at rest remains in the user's home Region by default. Furthermore, customers can implement Service Control Policies (SCPs) to restrict traffic exclusively to permitted inference profiles, ensuring that data processing remains within approved boundaries while still benefiting from the scalability of cross-Region routing.</p><p>This update is intended to assist Canadian enterprises in building and scaling generative AI workloads that require robust reasoning capabilities while navigating local data residency and operational resilience requirements.</p>

Source: aws.amazon.com
Original article: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/access-openai-gpt-models-on-amazon-bedrock-from-canada-with-cross-region-inference/