The observatory is owned and operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States, the National Research Council of Canada, CONICYT of Chile, MCTI of Brazil, MCTIP of Argentina, and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) of Republic of Korea.

The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) manages the operations and maintenance of the observatory through a cooperative agreement with the NSF, acting as the Executive Agency on behalf of the international partners.

The Southern Operations Center is located on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) campus near La Serena, Chile.

A further challenge in designing large instruments is the requirement to have a specific mass and center-of-mass position to maintain the overall balance of the telescope.

In November 2007 it was announced that the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) had proposed that, to save £4 million annually, it would aim to leave the telescope's operating consortium.

[citation needed] This decision significantly disrupted observatory budgets, and resulted in the cancellation of at least one instrument in development at that time, the Precision Radial Velocity Spectrograph.

The UK rethought their decision to withdraw from Gemini, and requested reinstatement into the agreement, and were officially welcomed back on February 27, 2008.

The U.S. members of the Board typically serve three year terms and are recruited and nominated by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which represents the US community in all aspects of Gemini operations and development.

Gemini is currently managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., on behalf of the partnership through an award from NSF.

The Program Officer monitors operations and development activities at the Observatory, nominates U.S. scientists to Gemini advisory committees, conducts reviews on behalf of the partnership, and approves funding actions, reports, and contracts.

Gemini-N routinely uses the ALTAIR system, built in Canada, which achieves a 30–45% Strehl ratio on a 22.5-arcsecond-square field and can feed NIRI, NIFS or GNIRS;[11] it can use natural or laser guide stars.

An adaptive secondary mirror has been considered for Gemini,[13] which would provide reasonable adaptive-optics corrections (equivalent to natural seeing at the 20th-percentile level for 80% of the time) to all instruments on the telescope to which it is attached.

The detectors in each instrument have recently been upgraded with Hamamatsu Photonics devices, which significantly improve performance in the far red part of the optical spectrum (700–1,000 nm).

[18] GPI was built by a consortium of US and Canadian institutions to fulfill the requirements of the ExAOC Extreme Adaptive Optics Coronagraph proposal.

The first phase of Gemini instrumentation development did not run smoothly; schedules slipped by several years, and budgets sometimes overran by as much as a factor of two.

Of order 90 percent of the available (clear weather) time is used for science, the rest being allocated to scheduled maintenance or lost to unforeseen technical faults.

In the same period approximately 10 percent of telescope time was assigned to the Fast Turnaround program, which in the second half of 2015 was over-subscribed by a factor of 1.6.

The resulting report, Advancing Astronomy in the Coming Decade: Opportunities and Challenges,[23] was released in August 2012 and included recommendations related to all of the major telescope facilities funded by NSF.

The Portfolio Review Committee report ranked Gemini Observatory as a critical component of the U.S.'s future astronomical research resources and recommended that the U.S. retain a majority share in the international partnership for at least the next several years.

NSF has since commissioned a National Research Council study, titled "A Strategy to Optimize the U.S. Optical/Infrared System in the Era of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope".

[24] The report made a recommendation that NSF work with its partners in Gemini to ensure that Gemini-South is well positioned for faint-object spectroscopy early in the era of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

With the signing of the new International Agreement in late 2015, support from the five signatories (the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) is secured for the period 2016–2021.

[25] The transient event was called PS1-13cbe and was located in the Galaxy SDSS J222153.87+003054.2 [25] On 22 October 2022, the 8.1m primary mirror of the Gemini North telescope was damaged when it touched an earthquake restraint while on a wash cart, being moved for stripping the silver coating before recoating.