Allow on‑premises data gateways to be registered outside the home tenant region

[bskvarch]

Problem Statement

Today, on‑premises data gateways must be registered in the Power BI tenant’s home region. In scenarios where the tenant is hosted in one geography and on‑premises data sources are located in another, this forces cross‑region execution for Import refresh and metadata operations.

For large Import models, this significantly increases refresh duration because bulk data ingest and control‑plane operations must traverse regions, even when the gateway and data source are co‑located.

Requested Capability

Allow administrators to explicitly register an on‑premises data gateway in a region other than the home tenant region, or to associate a gateway with a regional execution context closer to the data source.

This could be:

• A selectable region at gateway registration time, or
• A regional binding model similar to other Fabric connectivity constructs

Business Impact

• Material reduction in Import refresh times for globally distributed organizations
• Improved predictability and reliability of scheduled refreshes
• Better alignment with enterprise data‑locality and network‑topology constraints
• Reduced need for architectural workarounds when on‑premises data cannot be relocated

Why This Matters in Fabric

As Fabric becomes the unified analytics platform, customers increasingly operate with:

• Centralized tenants
• Distributed on‑premises estates
• Large Import workloads that are sensitive to ingest latency

Providing regional flexibility for gateways would materially improve customer experience without requiring changes to data residency policies.