Self-hosted LLM deployment
When the models have to run on your infrastructure.
Some institutions cannot send student data to a third party — because of the regulator, the research contract, the jurisdiction, or a governance position taken years ago and held for good reason. Running the models on the institution’s own infrastructure is something we do, so the recommendation comes with the ability to carry it out.
When this is the right answer
Not every institution needs this. Some cannot do without it.
Self-hosting costs more and moves slower than calling an API, so it is worth being clear about when it earns that. Four situations where it does.
- The data cannot leave
- A regulator, a research agreement or an institutional governance position rules out sending student or research data to a third-party model provider, whatever the contractual assurances.
- The jurisdiction is the constraint
- Where the record must stay is a legal question rather than a preference, and the answer is a specific country rather than a region.
- The workload is continuous
- Document processing at volume, running every day, where per-token pricing stops being the cheaper option and predictability starts to matter more than elasticity.
- The model must not change underneath you
- A process validated against one model’s behavior, where a provider’s version upgrade is a change you need to schedule rather than receive.
Worth saying plainly
Most institutions should start somewhere else.
For the majority of what higher education wants from AI, a governed hosted model on a platform that already holds the student record is faster to stand up, cheaper to run and easier to defend. Self-hosting is the right answer when a constraint makes it the only answer — and the conversation worth having first is which of your constraints are real. That is what an AI strategy engagement is for.
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Start here
Bring the constraint, not the requirement.
The useful conversation starts with what your institution is not allowed to do and why — the regulator, the contract, the governance position. We will tell you candidly whether self-hosting is warranted, and what it would take.