Air-Gapped AI Without Google's Appliance: Running Gemma, Mistral and NVIDIA GPUs on Your Own Kubernetes

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped provides a disconnected, Google-supplied hardware and software platform that can run proprietary Gemini models alongside open models such as Gemma and Mistral, while offering compliance accreditations relevant to defense and regulated organizations. Because Google does not release Gemini weights, organizations seeking Gemini inside an air-gapped environment must use GDC, whereas teams using open-weight models can build private inference on existing Kubernetes infrastructure with NVIDIA GPUs. The proposed self-managed architecture consists of GPU enablement, an offline registry and model storage system, an inference runtime such as vLLM or NVIDIA NIM, an OpenAI-compatible access gateway, and a developer self-service platform. The main operational challenge is maintaining an offline software supply chain, including mirroring and verifying images, drivers, charts, security updates, and large model files while managing version compatibility, certificates, storage, and upgrades. The comparison concludes that GDC is better suited to organizations requiring Gemini, vendor-provided accreditation, and integrated hardware, while Kubernetes-based deployments offer greater model choice and control for teams that already have platform expertise and can accept the operational burden; GPU utilization and engineering staffing are identified as the largest cost factors.

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