The purpose of this post is to share what I’ve learned (through prompting through AI) about capacity issues in Azure regions in the EU.
The data in this presentation was gathered and assembled by Claude.AI using social media data from the last 6 months. This does not guarantee that the data is accurate, but I have to admit that the anecdotal evidence that I have observed coincides with many of the findings.
Background
We’ve all been there. Maybe you were deploying App Services. Maybe you tried to make your firewall available across availability zones. Maybe you tried to deploy Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or even a small Azure SQL logical server. And you get greeted with something like:
{ "code": "DeploymentFailed", "target": "xxxxx", "message": "At least one resource deployment operation failed. Please list deployment operations for details. Please see https://aka.ms/arm-deployment-operations for usage details.", "details": [ { "code": "ResourceDeploymentFailure", "target": "xxxxx", "message": "The resource write operation failed to complete successfully, because it reached terminal provisioning state 'Failed'.", "details": [ { "code": "ProvisioningDisabled", "message": "Provisioning is restricted in this region. Please choose a different region. For exceptions to this rule please open a support request with Issue type of 'Service and subscription limits'. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/quota-increase-request for more details." } ] } ]}
That’s a hard block. You do what you are told and open a (free) support ticket to request some/more quota, once you figure out the maze of options in the awful support ticket experience. And then you wait … and wait … and you get an email from support to say “we’re looking into this” and you wait … and wait … and you get an email from support to say “we’re engaging with engineering” … and you wait … and you wait … and you get an email from support to say “sorry, we can’t give you capacity, but there’s some free space at the other side of the planet where you have no other resources and latency will suck for you, and who cares that you already invested loads into infrastructure and applications in region X”.
Where Then?
Brownfield scenarios where you have existing resources – that’s a mess. But let’s look for a better location for new deployments.
I use Claude.AI to inspect social media over the last 6 months and analyse Azure capacity reports across all EU-located regions. The following table was produced:
| Region | GA | Capacity Status | Service Breadth | Resource Types with Reported Issues |
| France Central | 2018 | 🟢 Stable | 🟢 Full | Azure OpenAI Standard quota tighter than Global Standard; no VM AllocationFailed reports |
| Germany West Central | 2019 | 🟢 Stable | 🟢 Full | No capacity failures reported; Responses API and Foundry Agent Service supported |
| Poland Central | 2023 | 🟢 Stable | 🟢 Full | No capacity failures reported; Responses API supported |
| Italy North | 2023 | 🟢 Stable | 🟢 Full | No capacity failures reported; Responses API supported; limited community signal |
| Spain Central | 2024 | 🟢 Stable | 🟡 Growing | Service roadmap (Nov 2025) had several categories at H1/H2 2026 availability; no capacity pressure; 3 AZs available |
| Austria East | 2025 | 🟢 Stable | 🟡 Growing | Broadly available from August 2025; 3 AZs; service catalogue still filling in; no capacity issues reported |
| Belgium Central | 2025 | 🟢 Stable | 🟡 Growing | Opened 18 November 2025; 3 AZs; Log Analytics Workspace not yet available as of early 2026; no capacity pressure |
| Denmark East | 2026 | 🟢 Stable | 🔴 Limited | GA March 2026; no availability zones; newest and most limited region — service catalogue is minimal |
| North Europe | 2009 | 🟡 Emerging pressure | 🟢 Full | Reported alongside UK South in community threads as absorbing overflow demand; VM allocation concerns growing |
| Sweden Central | 2021 | 🟠 Constrained | 🟢 Full | Major Azure OpenAI outage 27 Jan 2026 (IRM/OOM failures, all-day impact); retry amplification overload 29 May 2026 from Microsoft 365 Copilot traffic; H100 GPU capacity tighter than North Europe; DataZoneStandard quota denied on new tenants |
| West Europe | 2010 | 🟠 Constrained + feature gap | 🟡 Partial | D-series VMs flagged ‘in high demand’; SkuNotAvailable across multiple AZs; Responses API absent with no Microsoft ETA; customers waited weeks for OpenAI quota only to find region unsupported; thermal event knocked multiple storage scale units offline late 2025 |
As I said, this is an EU table. Finland Central is not included because it is not GA – 5+ years after MS Finland were asking customers to sign up for it. Norway East and Switzerland North are excluded (not EU members). UK South and UK West are excluded (UK left the EU in January 2020).
The best of the lot appear to be:
- France Central: Centrally located in the EU and capacity isn’t an issue thanks (maybe) to France increasingly abandoning non-EU cloud services.
- Germany West Central: See France Central – Germans have mostly been sceptical of US-owned cloud services since day 1.
- Poland Central: This region is brand new. Sharing a border with an aggressive neighbour might put it lower on the list for some.
- Italy North: Another relatively new region – but there’s little public evidence of capacity issues.