Gemini, Midjourney, Sora and DeepSeek Through a Proxy: Availability and Setup

You can reach Gemini, Midjourney or DeepSeek through a proxy, but a proxy only changes the network route; it does not change where your account, payment card or phone number are registered, and it does not make use from an unsupported country compliant with the provider's terms. Where it genuinely helps is a stable route on a filtered office network, access to your own subscription while travelling, and consistent egress for API calls from servers.

This article sums up how each of the four services handles regions in 2026, including the fact that OpenAI has closed Sora, shows when a proxy is a reasonable fix and when it is not, and walks through browser and API setup that keeps sessions stable.

Why AI Services Differ by Region

Generative AI products do not launch everywhere at once. Common reasons include:

• Regulation. Data protection authorities and AI rules differ, and some services delay launches in the EU or UK until they meet local requirements.
• Sanctions and export controls. US companies do not serve sanctioned countries, and payment processors refuse cards issued there.
• Local decisions about foreign apps. Several governments restricted DeepSeek on official devices or paused its app in local stores.
• Capacity and staged rollouts. New features often reach a few countries first.

Providers usually check several signals together: the IP address, the country of the account, billing details and sometimes the phone number. That is why a mismatched setup tends to end in a blocked payment or a suspended account rather than smooth access.

Availability at a Glance

Check the providers' own pages before relying on the table: lists change, and this is a summary, not a legal opinion.

Gemini

Google's help center lists where the Gemini web app works: more than 230 countries and territories, while the mobile apps cover a shorter list. Mainland China is limited to Workspace accounts, and Russia, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Syria are not on the list at the time of writing. Workspace administrators can also switch Gemini off for an organization, which produces an access message that no proxy will fix.

The typical legitimate reason for a proxy here is a network problem: a corporate gateway, a hotel network that breaks Google's AI endpoints or an ISP route with heavy packet loss. If you are on a work network, ask IT whether an approved route exists before setting up your own. For data collection around Google products, our Google proxies page covers the search side.

Midjourney

Midjourney works through its own web app and through Discord, and image generation has generally required a paid plan. The company does not publish a simple country block list, so problems usually come from elsewhere: a payment card that the processor rejects, Discord being unavailable on your network or a company firewall that blocks image CDNs.

A proxy helps with the last two when your use is allowed: for example, a designer travelling for work who needs the same subscription they pay for at home. It does not help with a rejected card, and Midjourney's terms allow it to suspend accounts that break its rules, including shared access.

Sora: Closed in 2026

OpenAI announced in March 2026 that it was shutting Sora down. The consumer app and website stopped working on 26 April 2026, and the API was scheduled to end on 24 September 2026. Any guide still promising Sora access through a proxy is outdated. Users were asked to export their videos before the cut-off; if you still need AI video, look at what other providers currently offer in your country.

DeepSeek

DeepSeek offers a web chat, mobile apps and an OpenAI-compatible API, and its services are reachable from most countries. Restrictions are mostly regulatory and local: in early 2025 Italy's privacy authority acted against the app, South Korea paused new downloads for a time, and several governments, including Australia and Taiwan, banned it on official devices.

Those decisions concern app distribution and work devices, so a proxy is not the answer. If your employer forbids DeepSeek on company equipment, the rule applies whatever route the traffic takes. The legitimate network case is again an unstable connection, especially to the API from servers.

When a Proxy Is the Right Tool

Reasonable cases:

• Unstable or filtered routes on hotel, airport, campus or ISP networks where the service is legal but connections fail.
• Travel with an account and subscription registered in a supported country.
• Server egress: scripts and agents calling AI APIs from one fixed, allowlisted IP.
• Testing your own product: checking how a feature built on Gemini or DeepSeek behaves for users in other markets.

Cases where it is the wrong tool: the service is not offered in your country, your employer blocks it on purpose, or local law restricts it. Using a proxy there breaks terms of service or policy and puts the account at risk. The same reasoning applies to the guides we wrote on ChatGPT through a proxy and on network problems with Claude.

Setting Up a Proxy in the Browser

Step 1. Use a Separate Browser Profile

Create a dedicated profile for AI tools. Cookies, extensions and saved sessions stay apart from your main browsing, and you can switch the proxy off for everything else.

Step 2. Add the Proxy

Install a proxy extension such as SwitchyOmega and create a profile with the protocol, host, port, login and password from your provider. Point it at the domains of the AI services or use it for the whole profile.

Step 3. Keep the Location Consistent

Choose a proxy in the country where your account and payment card are registered. Match the browser's language and time zone to it so the session does not look like it jumps between continents.

Step 4. Check Before Signing In

Open an IP lookup page and confirm the address and country. Also check that WebRTC does not reveal your real IP. Only then sign in to the AI service.

Using a Proxy With the APIs

For server-side code a proxy is just an outbound route. DeepSeek's API is compatible with the OpenAI Python client, which accepts a custom httpx client, so the proxy goes there:

import httpx
from openai import OpenAI

egress = httpx.Client(proxy="http://aiops:Lm4-pass@203.0.113.77:8080", timeout=60)

ds = OpenAI(
    api_key="replace-with-deepseek-key",
    base_url="https://api.deepseek.com",
    http_client=egress,
)
reply = ds.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-chat",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise RFC 1928 in two lines"}],
)
print(reply.choices[0].message.content)

Many SDKs, including Google's, rely on HTTP libraries that read the standard proxy variables, so for Gemini the simplest route is to set them for the process and confirm in the SDK docs that your version honours them:

export HTTPS_PROXY="http://aiops:Lm4-pass@203.0.113.77:8080"
python run_gemini_job.py

API keys and billing are still tied to your account and its country, so the proxy changes nothing about eligibility. For larger pipelines that feed models with collected data, see our overview of AI web scraping.

Which Proxy to Choose

Avoid rotating every request for chat interfaces: sign-ins and long conversations break when the IP changes mid-session. For per-country testing, residential proxies let you pick the location for each session.

Common Problems

The service says it is not available in your country even with a proxy. The account or billing country decides, not only the IP. A proxy is not a way around this.

Endless CAPTCHA or verification prompts. The IP is shared by many users or the session jumps between locations. Use one static address per profile.

Payment declined. The processor checks the card's country. Use a card from the country where you hold the subscription.

Answers stop midway in the browser. Streaming responses are long-lived connections. A proxy with short idle timeouts or a rotating IP cuts them; switch to a sticky session.