Two honest options.
Garnet vs. rolling your own
Both keep your data in your building. The difference is who does the work, and who you call when it breaks.
Design my Garnet →See the trust model
Roll your own
Everything you'd wire together.
The building blocks are real and capable. Assembling them, hardening the boundary, and keeping it all running is the job.
A Garnet buildOne system. Owned. Handed to you.Scope a build →Garnet vs. rolling your own private AI
If you have ruled out sending confidential work to the cloud, you have two honest options: commission a Garnet build, or roll your own private AI from the available building blocks. Both keep your data on hardware in your building. The real difference is the engineering time, the security hardening of the offline boundary, the hardware you must size and source, and who you call when it stops answering. A Garnet build hands you a finished, hardened system that Garnet designs, installs, and stands behind; family-office, private, and enterprise builds are scoped on request. Rolling your own means you own all of it, and all of the work.
01 / The engineering time
Someone has to do the integration, and it is not a weekend.
Every part of a private AI exists and most of it is open. The work is not inventing anything; it is choosing models that fit the hardware you bought, making them serve concurrently without falling over, connecting them to your own documents, and keeping that true through every update. A capable engineer can do all of it. The question is whether that is what you want them doing for the next few months, and what is not getting built while they do.
Commissioning moves that work to people who have done it before and arrive with the decisions already made. You are buying the integration, not the parts.
02 / The security gaps
The boundary is the product, and it fails quietly.
A private AI is only private while every path out stays closed. The model server, the document index, the admin interface, the update mechanism and whatever you put in front of it each have a way of reaching the internet, and several of them want to by default. Nothing announces it when one of them does: the system keeps answering, and the confidentiality is simply gone.
This is the part most self-builds get wrong, and the part that is hardest to test for, because a leak looks exactly like working software.
03 / The hardware calls
Buying the wrong machine is an expensive, slow mistake.
Memory, not raw speed, decides which models you can run at all, and the gap between a machine that runs what you need and one that nearly does is measured in months of waiting for parts. Power and heat are real constraints in an office rather than a data centre, and they are usually discovered after delivery.
On a Garnet build the hardware is ours. We specify it, provide it and maintain it under a managed lease, so a wrong call is our problem to fix and not a capital asset you are stuck depreciating.
04 / Who answers
Who you call at two in the morning.
A self-build is supported by whoever built it, for as long as they work for you. That is genuinely fine for some organisations and a serious exposure for others — the question is what happens to the system when that person is on leave, or leaves.
A commissioned build comes with a name to call: an audit retainer for architecture under continuous watch, cluster operations if you want the model layer run for you, or ad-hoc engineering at $600 an hour with a 24-hour response and no minimum. You can also take none of it and run the machine yourself; it is yours to operate.
The honest summary
Build it yourself if the work is the point.
If you have the engineers, the time and an appetite for owning the boundary, rolling your own is a legitimate answer and you will learn a great deal. Commission a Garnet if you want the capability without the project, if the material is too sensitive to be learning on, or if you need someone other than yourself to be accountable for it. Both keep your data in your building. That part is not the difference.