START WITH THE CONSTRAINT
Sovereignty is a design decision, not a product checkbox
The appropriate Private GenAI architecture depends on the information being processed, the acceptable model dependencies, where inference may occur and how outputs must be evaluated.
What data will the system process? Personal data, confidential documents, intellectual property and regulated information may require different protection and deployment choices.
Which models are acceptable? Public APIs, private model endpoints, adapted models and local small language models can coexist when the architecture routes each workload appropriately.
Where can inference take place? Controlled cloud, private infrastructure, on premises and air gapped environments each answer a different operational requirement.
How will performance be judged? Grounding, multilingual quality, task accuracy and human review thresholds should be defined before the system is trusted in production.