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This article explains where Windows 365 Business Cloud PCs are created, how Microsoft determines that location, and what to do if your organization needs a Cloud PC provisioned in a specific, guaranteed location.
Important
Windows 365 Business does not let you choose, configure, or request the region or country where your Cloud PCs are provisioned. Placement is determined automatically, based on available datacenter capacity and your organization's default geography. If your organization requires a guaranteed provisioning location, see Need a guaranteed provisioning location? later in this article.
Check if Windows 365 Business is available in your country/region
To find out if Windows 365 Business can be purchased in your country/region:
- Go to the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 International Availability page in your browser.
- Scroll to the Windows 365 section.
- Confirm your country/region is listed in the Countries and Regions column.
How your Cloud PC provisioning location is determined
When a Windows 365 Business license is assigned to a user, Microsoft automatically provisions a Cloud PC for that user. Neither you nor your users select, configure, or request the region, country, or datacenter where that Cloud PC runs. Placement works as follows:
- Your organization's billing address is the starting point. The country/region on your billing address maps to a default geographic location. When a customer creates a new Microsoft Entra ID tenant, the customer enters a country/region during the creation process. This country/region is what defines the default geography for the tenant. There are multiple paths to creating tenants. They can be created through Microsoft Entra ID forms, or when trying out new Microsoft 365 services (trials), among others. Once a tenant is created, the default geography can't be changed.
- Microsoft makes every reasonable effort to provision close to that location. We aim to place your Cloud PC in, or as near as possible to, the geographic region associated with your billing address. However, the final provisioning location is determined by available capacity for Windows 365 Business offers.
- Available capacity determines the final location. Cloud PC provisioning depends on datacenter capacity at the moment the license is assigned. If there's no capacity in the default location, your Cloud PC is created in the nearest supported location that has capacity.
Note
Proximity to your billing address is a goal, not a guarantee. Because final placement depends on real-time capacity, Microsoft can't guarantee your Cloud PC will be created in the closest possible datacenter, or even in the same country as your billing address. In some cases, a Cloud PC may be provisioned in a different country than your organization's billing address or default geography.
Where is a Cloud PC created?
The Data Location Card (DLC) in the Microsoft 365 admin center allows tenant Global Admins to see where in-scope customer data associated with certain Microsoft 365 Core Services and Microsoft 365 Expanded Services is stored at rest. To access the Data Location Card, select the Data location section in the Microsoft 365 admin center by navigating to Admin > Settings > Org settings > Organization profile > Data location.
Remember that this is only a starting point. As explained above, your Cloud PC may ultimately be created in a different location if there's no available capacity in that default location at the time it's provisioned.
Need a guaranteed provisioning location?
Some organizations have data residency, compliance, or latency requirements that call for Cloud PCs to be provisioned in a specific, guaranteed region or country. If that describes your organization, Windows 365 Enterprise may be a better fit.
Windows 365 Enterprise uses admin-configured provisioning policies that let you choose:
- A specific region, so Cloud PCs are only provisioned in the region you select.
- A single region group, so Cloud PCs are distributed across that region group for added resiliency, without leaving it.
- All default regions within a geography, which Microsoft recommends for maximizing resiliency across a broader area.
Unlike Windows 365 Business, this selection is enforced: Cloud PCs provisioned under an Enterprise provisioning policy are created only in the region or regions you specify. See the links below to configure a provisioning policy or to compare whether Enterprise better fits your organization's requirements.