Can you use large AI models without sending data to the cloud?
Yes. Capable open-weight models can run on your own hardware – in your own data centre, at a provider in the country of your choice, or fully offline. The data then never leaves the controlled environment; the price is GPU infrastructure and operational effort.
The dilemma
The most capable AI models today run at a handful of cloud providers, mostly abroad. Using them to process or check confidential documents means handing over exactly those documents – and possibly placing them under foreign jurisdiction.
Open-weight models
With open-weight models, the model weights are freely available. They run on any sufficiently powerful hardware – with no connection to the vendor. The largest of them now come close to the cloud providers' frontier models on many tasks.
Three ways to operate
- On your side: on your own infrastructure, on-premise or in a private cloud.
- At a provider: on dedicated hardware in a chosen country – such as Liechtenstein, Switzerland or Germany.
- Air-gapped: fully disconnected from the internet, for classified or highly sensitive data.
What to weigh
Large models need powerful GPUs with a lot of memory, plus operation, monitoring and updates. Whether your own hardware pays off or a sovereign provider fits better depends mainly on document volume and data residency requirements.