Every named connector routes through US-domiciled cloud.
Notion, Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. Each is an OAuth-gated SaaS operated from US infrastructure. Building an on-prem LLM to talk to a cloud Notion is a coherence failure. The data is already off-prem; the model's residency does not improve the locality story.
Five connectors · five OAuth handshakes · one boundary crossed five times
On-prem
8× H200 LLM
Weights and inference resident in AU, behind the rack door.
AUD 1.59M / 3 yrs
The boundary
crossed × 5
Notion
Gmail
Calendar
Word
Excel
Notion
Notion-hosted SaaS · US-domiciled
OAuth user-scopedno bearer / machine auth
Gmail
Google · US / EU regions
OAuth 2.0mail bodies in Google cloud
Google Workspace Calendar
Google · US / EU regions
OAuth 2.0multi-jurisdiction routing
Microsoft Word
Microsoft 365 · tenant region configurable to AU
OAuth 2.0 / Graphcontrol plane via MS cloud
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft 365 · tenant region configurable to AU
OAuth 2.0 / Graphcell-level MCP is third-party
·The coherence failure
if the workflow that drives the on-prem investment is the LLM reading Notion and drafting Gmail, the data is already off-prem before the model touches it
five for five
·Pattern A · keep the LLM internally consistent
restrict to genuinely on-prem data — file shares, local databases, internal wikis, code repositories; accept that cloud SaaS is out of scope
architecturally clean
·Pattern B · self-host the integration targets
Outline / AppFlowy / Affine for Notion; mailcow / Mailu for mail; Nextcloud Office or OnlyOffice for documents — significant operational burden at 10-person scale
rarely cost-justified
·Tool-calling fidelity at long context
open-weight BFCL v4 ≈ 85% vs frontier ≈ 95%; tool-call schema fidelity degrades when system prompt is buried under 300k+ tokens of context
~10 pt gap
·Custom adapter work, if self-hosting
per non-trivial connector — OAuth/SSO plumbing and per-tool schema design dominate
AUD 5–25k each
SourceOn-prem frontier LLM briefing, §6 MCP and integrations. Server-location and auth claims taken from each connector's published documentation. Tenant residency for Microsoft 365 is configurable to Australia, but the Graph API control plane still routes through Microsoft's cloud regardless of tenant region — for the LLM-touches-document question, this is the binding fact.