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A Foundry runner doesn’t do one kind of work. Each Mac advertises a set of services, and the queue hands it only the job types it advertises and its credentials permit. This page is the reference for what those services are and, for each one, whether the material stays on your hardware.
Foundry is available to select customers only. Contact us to discuss dedicated runners and data-residency requirements.

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The services

Object training is the one service that must run on a Mac: it depends on the Apple toolchain, which is why Foundry is a fleet of Macs in the first place. Pose extraction is the opposite case: it’s hosted inference, so it runs server-side and never on your hardware. One service runs only on Holos servers for a different reason. The texture bake, which makes a large 3D scan light enough for a headset to render, needs a Blender build that exists for Linux but not for Apple silicon. It belongs to object processing rather than to a service you switch on, and no Mac is offered the work. When your own runners are offline, Holos capacity picks up the capture services so uploads still finish processing.

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Choosing which services a runner takes

Each runner’s credentials permit a set of services: a ceiling we set with you when your fleet is provisioned, and widen or narrow on request. Within that ceiling, the Foundry app’s Services switches (Settings → Services) let the person at the Mac decide what it actually takes on: a machine can train objects overnight and stay out of the capture pipeline, for instance. A service its credentials don’t permit is marked in that window rather than hidden, so “why isn’t this Mac taking transcription jobs” always has a visible answer.
Transcription requires macOS 26 or later, because it uses Apple’s on-device speech models. On an older Mac the service is listed as unsupported and those jobs go elsewhere.

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Where your data is processed

Some services do all their work on the machine that claimed the job. Others hand the material to an external provider, which is a decision you may need to account for. This distinction is a property of the provider, not the service: the same job type can be local or external depending on which provider ran it. The same table is in the dashboard, under Where is my data processed? on the Runners page, where it always reflects what your fleet currently runs. The two rows naming fal.ai are served only by Holos-side capacity, never by your Macs. With your own runners online, transcription is handled by Apple’s on-device models and the audio stays on the machine. The three services that read language, step extraction, procedure extraction and alignment, each offer the same choice of provider, and the choice is what decides whether anything leaves. On Apple’s on-device models the work happens on the Mac and nothing is sent. Apple Private Cloud Compute and Anthropic are both hosted, so the text goes to them wherever the job was claimed. No provider credentials are ever stored on a runner, and runners only ever make outbound requests to Holos. Every finished job records which provider did the work, so what left is answerable per job rather than in general. The dashboard labels each run in the job queue.
If your organization needs a service pinned to your own hardware, that’s a fleet configuration we set up with you. Talk to us about residency requirements.