An air-gapped environment has no route to the outside world, so everything your system needs must already be inside it: model weights, dependencies, container images, licences. Frontier labs run federal variants of forward-deployed roles specifically for this, and the constraints reshape the architecture rather than just the deployment script.
Worked example: you cannot call a hosted model API, cannot pull a package at build time, cannot ship telemetry out, and cannot debug from your laptop — so the system needs a local model, vendored dependencies, an exportable diagnostic bundle and error messages that explain themselves. Gotcha: the update path is the part people under-plan; a fix that takes an hour to write can take six weeks to deliver through a controlled transfer process.