Air-Gapped AI Deployment
Running AI systems on infrastructure with no external network connectivity.
What is Air-Gapped AI Deployment?
Air-gapped deployments are required in defence, intelligence, and certain critical infrastructure environments where no data — including model weights, prompts, or telemetry — may leave the physical perimeter. This is the most constrained form of on-prem AI and demands local models, local retrieval, and offline-capable orchestration. See Air-Gapped AI Deployments for Restricted Networks.
What is an example of Air-Gapped AI Deployment?
A defence analysis environment imports an approved open-weight model and signed software bundle through a transfer station. Analysts search classified documents and run agents entirely inside the isolated network; audit data is reviewed locally and never sent to a vendor.
How is Air-Gapped AI Deployment different from related concepts?
On-premises describes where software runs. Air-gapped describes network isolation. An on-premises system can still call the internet, while a true air-gapped system cannot.
Why it matters for on-premise & regulated AI
Air-gapped deployment is the strictest form of on-premise AI: no internet egress, models and updates delivered by controlled transfer, and telemetry that never phones home. Defense, intelligence, critical infrastructure, and some financial workloads require it outright. The practical challenge is not the model — open-weight LLMs run fine offline — but the platform: orchestration, RAG, and governance must all function without any cloud dependency.
What should enterprises evaluate for Air-Gapped AI Deployment?
- List every dependency that normally calls home, including authentication, package registries, model hubs, observability, and license validation.
- Define controlled import, rollback, vulnerability remediation, model provenance, and offline disaster-recovery procedures.
- Test installation, inference, retrieval, monitoring, backup, and restore with external network access physically or logically unavailable.
Related terms
Putting Air-Gapped AI Deployment to work?
VDF AI runs governed AI agents on your own infrastructure — on-premises, sovereign cloud, or air-gapped. Book a working session to map the architecture.
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