National security agencies and other sovereign and highly regulated organizations handle incredibly sensitive data such as classified reports, field manuals, and sensitive multi-modal datasets. Search and multimodal intelligence that’s available in the public cloud can help teams manage and analyze that data, but due to strict data sovereignty mandates, that data cannot leave the customer premises.
The alternative has been to deploy custom agentic search inside a secure, disconnected perimeter, but until now, that meant months building and maintaining custom infrastructure — stitching together models, building speech-to-text and optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines, configuring vector databases, and managing a bespoke user interface.
Today, we’re excited to announce enterprise search capabilities with Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped to help solve the above challenges. In preview, this fully managed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) search experience runs entirely inside your physical security perimeter, with no connection to the public internet or to Google Cloud’s global infrastructure. Your teams can now upload their files into a conversation and ask Gemini to find information about it, summarize it, compare it, or translate it. Every answer cites its sources, and conversations persist between sessions.
Enterprise search capabilities on GDC enable your teams to search across siloed data and unlock powerful insights. With these capabilities, you can now:
- Go from hundreds of pages to a cited answer: Ask questions across long manuals, reports, and policies, and see exactly which files each answer came from.
- Work across languages: Ask in one language and get answers grounded in documents written in another, or have Gemini translate them.
- Ask one question across many formats: Combine audio recordings, video clips, images, and spreadsheets with no separate transcription or OCR steps.
- Pick up where you left off: Conversations and files persist between sessions, so you don’t have to start from scratch on long-running work.
- Keep access need-to-know: Each user’s chats and files are private to that user, and access follows the identity provider groups you already manage.
Users can work with PDF, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, plus TXT, HTML, PNG and JPEG images, WAV audio, and MP4 video. Each file can be up to 100 MB, and each chat up to 500 MB.
Core architectural layers: under the hood
Let’s follow a user query through each layer of the stack: signing in, ingesting files, generating the response with Gemini, and storing the session. Every step happens on the organization’s air-gapped network.
