For defense, intelligence, federal civilian, classified financial, and critical-infrastructure workloads, the cloud is not an option. The data, the models, and the agents all need to live inside the customer's perimeter — often air-gapped from any outbound network. The category for this exists; what's been missing is parity with the cloud experience.
What sovereign actually means
- Air-gapped — zero outbound network. Updates arrive as signed bundles via removable media or one-way diodes.
- BYO silicon — heterogeneous fleet inside the customer perimeter; vendor-neutral.
- BYO models — customer-controlled weights; no third-party model dependency.
- BYO identity — integrates with on-prem AD, PKI and customer-operated SSO.
- Operations under customer SOC — full SIEM integration, no vendor backdoor.
The parity problem
Most 'on-prem' AI stacks are stripped-down — no smart routing, no governance console, no continuous evals. That gap is where customers historically gave up and built parallel systems. The bar we hold ourselves to: every feature on the cloud also runs on-prem, with the same console and the same APIs. Parity is the product.
What ships in the appliance
- 1.Inference fabric — full heterogeneous scheduler, optimized runtimes per silicon class.
- 2.AI Gateway — both inference and agent gateways, with on-prem identity bindings.
- 3.Agent Runtime — multi-agent orchestration, memory, tools, connectors to your systems of record.
- 4.Control Plane — governance, audit, FinOps, evals, all behind your firewall.
- 5.Update channel — signed bundle releases, customer-validated before install.
"We deployed inside a SCIF in eight weeks. Same console, same APIs, same self-improvement loops. The cloud team and the on-prem team share notebooks now."
Operational realities
Sovereign deployments need different operating discipline: change control, model provenance attestation, hardware lifecycle planning and disconnected eval pipelines. Bring those expectations to the conversation, choose a vendor that has actually shipped behind real airgaps, and don't accept feature gaps as 'just how on-prem is.' Parity is achievable. Demand it.