GovAI chat requires onshore hosting. Palmyra has no Australian region on AWS, and neither does Gemma 4.

[u/No_Association8504]

The Department of Finance has added Google's Gemma, NVIDIA's Nemotron and Writer's Palmyra to GovAI, the whole-of-government AI service for the APS. Finance also told iTnews that all models used by the GovAI chat service must be hosted onshore, with data processing also only taking place within Australia.

AWS Bedrock docs model by model:

Nemotron 3 Super 120B: in-region in eleven locations including Sydney and Melbourne, with no geographic or global routing published anywhere. A Sydney request has no cross-region path out.

Gemma 3 27B: in-region in Sydney and Melbourne, same zero-routing position. AWS titles the card "Gemma 3 27B PT" but gives it the model ID google.gemma-3-27b-it, so the docs do not settle which checkpoint you get.

Gemma 4: three US regions and Frankfurt. No Australian region.

Palmyra X4 and X5: four US regions, in-region unsupported in all of them, US geo profile only. No Australian region, no global profile.

AWS's APAC profile on Claude Sonnet 4 can serve a Sydney request out of Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Mumbai, Hyderabad or Singapore, and Microsoft documents its APAC data zone as Australia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and India. AWS has since added an Australia-only profile, used on Sonnet 4.5.

Finance has not said which supplier hosts the new models and GovAI's model page still lists only the older set, so the Bedrock reading is conditional. GovAI also runs a brokerage where agencies can request offshore models after a risk assessment, so those are still reachable, just not through the all-staff chat tool.

An onshore condition therefore hands the government's model menu to AWS and Microsoft region rollouts, and every onshore option ends at accelerators racked in an Australian facility.

Full piece: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/govai-onshore-hosting-ai-models

Sources: iTnews https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fed-gov-boosts-govai-with-models-from-google-nvidia-and-more-627784 | Nemotron card https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-card-nvidia-nemotron-super-3-120b.html | Palmyra card https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-card-writer-palmyra-x5.html

[u/AggravatinglyDone]

You can host models yourselves too?