Four deployment boundaries, from fastest to strictest
Private AI is not one thing. It is a choice about where your data is allowed to be processed, and the cost climbs as the boundary tightens. Most teams pick the loosest option their obligations permit.
- Provider API with a data processing agreement and zero retention. Fast, cheap, fine for most commercial content. Your data still transits a third party under contract.
- EU region endpoints on Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock or Vertex AI. Requests stay on European infrastructure under an EU entity. Usually enough to satisfy a GDPR review.
- Managed inference inside your own VPC. The model runs on infrastructure you control, reachable only from your network, with no public endpoint at all.
- On premise on your own GPU hardware. Nothing leaves the building. The only option that survives a rule saying data must never touch external infrastructure, and the most expensive to run.
