Your own AI. Fully offline. In your building.

Everyone can rent a frontier model. Almost no one owns the operation that turns it into margin — whose building it runs in, whose hardware holds it, whose hands are on the data. That's the whole game, and it's the one we play with you.

For: regulated organizations that cannot put their data in a cloud AI — healthcare handling PHI under HIPAA, state/local government and federal-civilian teams handling CUI, legal practices protecting privilege, financial services, and semiconductor or IP-heavy shops guarding trade secrets. Our beachhead is healthcare: no clearance required, a clear HIPAA driver, and a fast buy cycle.

Not for: anyone who needs frontier-model (GPT-5.x/Opus-tier) quality at cloud speed with no regulatory driver — cloud is cheaper and faster for them, and we'll say so. Not for classified/SCIF prime work either: that requires a facility clearance we don't hold yet.

We sell a single owned box as the default — simpler, faster for interactive use, and honest. One continuity worth stating plainly: the Entry rung below is the same "Drakon Forge · from $15,000" you saw on our home page. It is the entry rung of this ladder; the Sovereign appliance from $45K+ is the top of the same ladder, not a different product line.

Every tier includes a local vector database (Qdrant/Milvus), OCR document ingestion, Open WebUI with role-based access control, and a compliance-documentation package (HIPAA / CMMC / ATO artifacts) — worth $20–40k standalone, and the real reason a buyer picks us over raw iron.

A single box is the default. When a client needs a model too big for one box (the 600B–1T class), we pool memory across boxes today — shipped hardware, not a promise. RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 shipped in macOS 26.2, and the M3 Ultra has TB5 on every port, so separate boxes read each other's unified memory at near-local latency. Independently proven: four M3 Ultras pooled ≈ 1.5TB of memory running Exo, with DeepSeek V3.1 671B producing 32.5 tok/s across the 4 nodes.

The honest caveats — which are also the moat, because we state them plainly:

1. Capacity, not speed — pooling lets you run a model that won't fit one box; it does not make a model that fits go faster.
2. Exo / MLX-Distributed only.
3. 4-node ceiling today — no Thunderbolt 5 switch exists.
4. New and not hardened — we validate the rig in-house before it ships.
5. One box usually suffices; we lead with single-box and cluster only when the model demands it.

Honest note: secondary-market hardware pricing is availability-indexed and confirmed at procurement, not a fixed quote — the market is thin and moves fast. The $45k entry and $4.5k/mo SLA are the public anchors; tier prices and the monthly SLA are directional until BOM and labor lock.

"I can buy a Dell/NVIDIA server for that." You can — and raw iron still needs months of integration, model selection, RAG, hardening, and audit documentation before it does anything. Sovereign is operational in days with the compliance package included.

"Cloud AI is cheaper." For unregulated data, yes. For PHI/CUI, cloud is a compliance liability you can't buy back after a breach. Owning also beats metered GPU rental within roughly 12 months at steady use.

"Is it as good as ChatGPT?" The Standard tier is GPT-4-class; the Entry rung runs smaller starter models, and higher tiers run frontier-class open weights. The honest tradeoff: slightly behind the very latest cloud model, but it's yours and it's offline.

"Can you even buy a high-memory Mac Studio right now?" The shortage pulled Apple's 512/256GB configs; Apple sells 96GB direct. High-memory units are hard to find, not impossible — they still trade on the secondary market, we're the specialists who source and verify a real one, and we're M5-launch-ready.

Forge runs the hardware; Drakon Aegis is the operating layer that runs on top of it.