🤖 Why Google Gemini Does Not Work via VPN
In short
Google Gemini blocks requests coming from hosting and data-center IP addresses. Our VPS run on professional infrastructure, so Google's filters reject those connections. This restriction is enforced on Google's side and cannot be bypassed from the VPN server.
What it looks like
With the VPN on, any Gemini endpoint shows one of these symptoms:
- the sign-in page loads forever or drops your session;
- a message such as “Gemini isn't available yet in your country” or “You're not eligible to use Gemini”, even though the service is available in the server's country;
- the prompt is submitted but an error comes back instead of an answer;
- turning the VPN off makes everything work immediately.
If Gemini fails with the VPN off as well, the server is not the cause — look at your Google account or the service's regional availability.
Why Google does this
Google treats data-center connections as higher risk: that is where most automated requests, scraping, and quota-evasion attempts come from. Generative services (Gemini, AI Studio, the Gemini API) are guarded more tightly than search or mail, so anti-fraud filters reject the request before you even sign in.
Address ranges belonging to hosting providers and clouds are publicly known — they are listed in registries and identifiable by autonomous system number (ASN). Any VPS from any provider falls into those lists; this is not specific to Amnezia Hosting.
Inaccurate geo databases add to it
A separate reason behind odd replies such as “Gemini isn't available yet in your country” is outdated geolocation data for our addresses in third-party GeoIP databases: a service may resolve the server's country incorrectly and refuse access by region.
What we have already done: data for our ranges has been submitted to all the major commercial GeoIP databases (MaxMind, IP2Location, DB-IP, and others) and recorded in the official internet registries. We are waiting for those providers and the services themselves to refresh their records — the timing is on their side, and updates ship with delays ranging from weeks to a few months.
More on how this works: Why your server's geolocation mismatches.
What changes once the databases update
A correct country removes region-based refusals, but the data-center filter stays — it has nothing to do with geolocation. So do not count on Gemini starting to work behind the VPN on its own: use the options in the section below.
Why VPN settings cannot work around it
The filtering is based on IP reputation, not on traffic contents. That is why the tricks that normally defeat ISP-level blocking do not help here:
| What people try | Why it does not help |
|---|---|
| Switching protocol (AmneziaWG → XRay/VLESS) | Masking hides traffic from your ISP, but Google still sees the server address the request came from. |
Changing the port or SNI (443, 8443, ya.ru) | Those parameters only affect the path to your server, not the IP Google sees. |
| Reinstalling the OS or reissuing keys | The address stays the same, and it still belongs to a data center. |
| Moving the server to another location | The new address belongs to a data center too and hits the same filter. |
The restriction only lifts for addresses Google considers residential — and hosting providers do not have those by definition.
What you can do
Turn the VPN off while using Gemini. The simplest option if you need Gemini only occasionally.
Set up split tunneling. The AmneziaVPN app can exclude specific sites from the tunnel: everything else keeps going through your server while Gemini connects directly from your home address. Exclude these domains:
textgemini.google.com aistudio.google.com generativelanguage.googleapis.comThe setting lives in the split-tunneling section (sites/apps) — see VPN Setup.
Use a different AI service. ChatGPT and Claude, for example, normally work fine from data-center addresses.
Keep in mind with split tunneling
Traffic excluded from the tunnel goes out from your home address — visible to your ISP and carrying your real location. If you specifically need Gemini behind the VPN, this approach will not do.
This is not a server fault
Verifying the VPS is easy: if the server answers over SSH and other sites open through the VPN, the hosting and the VPN are working normally and the restriction is entirely on Google's side. Support cannot add your server address to Google's exceptions — no hosting provider has access to those filters.
If nothing at all works through the VPN, not just Gemini, that is a different problem — see Troubleshooting (FAQ).