Where is Sanity's data physically located? Latency concerns for Australia

Great question! Your concern about latency from Australia is totally valid. Here's the situation with Sanity's data residency:

Primary data location: Sanity's Content Lake stores your data in Belgium (specifically in St. Ghislain, using Google Cloud infrastructure). This is currently the primary data center location for most Sanity datasets.

But here's the good news for performance: Sanity uses a highly optimized global CDN with a Point of Presence (POP) in Australia. The CDN is specifically tuned to minimize latency concerns through several smart strategies:

1. Stale-while-revalidate: The CDN serves cached content while updating in the background, so even when editors publish updates, end users typically never experience cache misses during sustained traffic
2. Selective cache invalidation: Only published documents trigger cache updates (not drafts), so your journalists working throughout the day won't constantly invalidate the cache
3. Global distribution: Query results are distributed worldwide across the CDN network

Real-world Australian experience: Sanity has multiple large customers in Australia already, and according to Sanity's CTO, they haven't received complaints about performance issues. The CDN typically delivers 15-20ms response times for cached queries.

What about uncached queries? If you're doing real-time queries directly to the origin (bypassing the CDN), yes, you'll see that ~350-700ms round trip due to the speed of light between Sydney and Belgium. However, for most production use cases with sustained traffic, the CDN architecture handles this well.

Future plans: Sanity has mentioned plans to offer selectable data regions in the future, but it's not currently on their immediate roadmap since it hasn't been a critical issue for their existing Australian customers in real-world usage.

Bottom line: If you're building mostly static sites (Gatsby, Next.js with SSG/ISR) or sites with reasonable traffic that keeps the CDN warm, latency shouldn't be a blocker. The CDN architecture is specifically designed to handle your high-frequency publishing scenario with multiple journalists.