Introduction of Macro Region-Based Environment Provisioning

We are introducing an enhancement to environment provisioning that enables customers to select a Macro Region during environment creation on June 29, 2026.

• Customers will select a Macro Region (e.g., North America, Europe & UK, Asia-Pacific) instead of a specific geography (geo).
• The platform will automatically assign the optimal region within the selected Macro Region based on capacity, availability, and performance considerations.
  

This approach helps ensure a more scalable, resilient, and performant experience for all customers while continuing to respect data residency commitments.

What is Changing

• New tenants (not meeting geo-selection eligibility criteria) will select a Macro Region and will not explicitly choose a region during environment creation. Customers will see their Macro region and region in the environment properties and in the environment list.
  
  

  #	Macro Region geography	Regions Countries	Tooltips
  1	North America	United States, Canada	Your data will reside within the United States or Canada.
  2	The Americas	United States, Canada, Brazil	Your data will reside within the Americas, including North and South America.
  3	European Union & EFTA	France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands	Your data will reside within European Union EU and EFTA member states which are EUDB regions
  4	Europe & UK	UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands	Your data will reside within European Union & EFTA or the United Kingdom and it should not be considered EUDB
  5	Europe, UK, Middle East, Africa	UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, South Africa, UAE	Your data will reside within Europe, UK, Middle East, or Africa.
  6	Asia-Pacific	Singapore, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea	Your data will reside within the Asia Pacific region.



• The system will automatically determine the region within that Macro Region geography using capacity-based routing, performance and availability.
• Customers will continue to see their data location (region) transparently after provisioning.
• Existing tenants remain unchanged and retain their current region selection capabilities.

Geo-selection eligibility criteria

Tenants who meet criteria will continue to have the ability to select a specific region during environment creation. Qualifying criteria include (any one of the following):

• If customer had Advanced data residency (Advanced data residency in Microsoft 365 – Microsoft 365 Enterprise) enabled for M365 in this tenant.
• High-scale deployments (100+ paid D365 licenses or 1 TB+ Dataverse storage)
• Premium Dynamics 365 workloads (Finance Premium or Supply Chain Premium with >= 20 paid licenses)
• High-scale Premium Power Platform workloads (Power Apps or Power Automate >= 5000 paid licenses)
• Specialized workloads (e.g., Contact Center) This ensures customers with geo control requirements for data residency can continue operating with full flexibility.

Data Residency & Compliance

• Data will always reside within the selected Macro Region boundary.
• Where applicable, compliance constructs such as EU Data Boundary (EUDB) are preserved and clearly communicated.
• The platform does not expand residency guarantees beyond contractual commitments.

Customer Experience Example

• A customer selects “Europe & UK” as their Macro Region.
• The platform assigns a region (e.g., Germany, or Italy) based on capacity & availability.
• The customer can view the assigned region after provisioning.
• If the customer requires region selection (e.g., France), they can:
  • Qualify for geo selection criteria, or
  • Engage Microsoft support for exception handling.

Continuity for Existing Customers: There is no impact to existing environments or tenants. Existing customers retain current region selections and continue to have access to geo-based provisioning like they always have for their existing tenants, ensuring a non-disruptive rollout while enabling a modern provisioning model for newer environments.