Is Ollama fully offline? Yes.
Ollama runs entirely on your local machine. After you download the installer and pull a model, Ollama generates text with no internet connection required. Your prompts, responses and conversation history never leave your computer.
The only time Ollama uses the internet is when you explicitly download a new model with ollama pull. Everything else — inference, the local API, the CLI — works completely offline.
Local by design
When you run ollama run llama3, the model weights are loaded from your local disk into RAM or VRAM. The inference runs on your CPU or GPU. Results are returned to your terminal or to localhost:11434 — there is no network call to any external server.
This is fundamentally different from cloud AI services (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) where your prompts are sent to remote servers. With Ollama, the entire language model and all computation stays on your hardware.
| Action | Uses internet? |
|---|---|
Running a model (ollama run) | No — fully local |
| Calling the API at localhost:11434 | No — local only |
Downloading a model (ollama pull) | Yes — downloads from registry |
| Checking for updates | Only if you manually check |
Where does Ollama store data on Windows?
All Ollama data is stored locally in your Windows user profile:
There is no cloud sync, no telemetry upload, and no data sent to Ollama servers during normal use. Model files stay on your local drive until you explicitly delete them with ollama rm modelname.
How to run Ollama completely offline
Once you have downloaded your models, you can go fully offline:
- 1
Pull the models you need while connected
C:\> ollama pull llama3C:\> ollama pull mistralBoth models downloaded and ready - 2
Disconnect from the internet
Disable Wi-Fi or unplug the ethernet cable. Ollama continues running normally with no errors.
- 3
Use Ollama as normal
C:\> ollama run llama3>>> Send a message (/? for help)# Works with no internet connection
Block Ollama from the internet with Windows Firewall
If you want to enforce offline use and prevent Ollama from ever making outbound connections (for example, in a high-security environment), add a Windows Firewall outbound rule:
Privacy and offline questions
Does Ollama send my prompts to the cloud?
Does Ollama collect telemetry?
Can I use Ollama in an air-gapped environment?
.ollama/models folder and can be copied between machines.Is my conversation history stored anywhere?
ollama run session starts fresh. Within a session, context is held in RAM only and is cleared when you exit. No conversation logs are written to disk unless a third-party client app you are using does so explicitly.Does ollama require internet after model download?
ollama pull, you can completely disconnect from the internet and Ollama will continue working normally. The only internet connection needed is the initial model download.