Pinecone is a managed vector database for AI applications. Developers use it for search, recommendations and long-term memory for AI agents. An index supports dense and sparse vectors, full-text search and hybrid search, complemented by metadata filters, reranking and namespaces that keep each tenant's data separate. According to Pinecone, the service is serverless, so you do not plan capacity or manage infrastructure. A BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option also exists, in which Pinecone runs in your own cloud account.
Pinecone is a US company, and its software is not open source. When you create a serverless index you choose the cloud provider and region; besides US regions, EU regions are available on AWS (Ireland and Frankfurt) and on Google Cloud (Netherlands). That choice cannot be changed afterwards. A European organisation that wants to keep data inside the EU therefore needs to select an EU region when creating the index, while bearing in mind that the vendor itself is subject to US jurisdiction.