First Technology Group has launched FirstCore.AI, a dedicated AI business that builds sovereign AI infrastructure for South African organisations. Its first service, the FirstCore.AI Factory, gives businesses locally hosted AI inference: the models run in South Africa, and the prompts, documents and answers that pass through them stay in South Africa, under South African law.
The question that stalls AI projects
Most South African businesses no longer need to be convinced that AI is worth it. They can see the benefits: less admin, faster access to information and work that runs itself. According to Chris Ainslie, General Manager of FirstCore.AI, building the AI is often the easy part. The harder question comes from legal, compliance and risk teams, and it is a simple one: where does our data go?
POPIA sets clear rules for how customer, employee and business information is handled. Sending that information to an AI service hosted in another country is often hard to justify, so many projects never move past the pilot stage. In Ainslie’s words, companies have been choosing between sending sensitive data offshore and putting their AI plans on hold. FirstCore.AI was set up so they no longer have to make that choice.
What the FirstCore.AI Factory is
The AI Factory is a GPU platform for running AI models, operated by FirstCore.AI from FirstNet’s South African data centre on infrastructure that First Technology Group owns and manages. It is already live and running customer workloads.
- Your prompts, documents and model outputs stay on local infrastructure
- The platform and your data fall under South African jurisdiction
- You know who runs the infrastructure and where it is
Built for production, not just demos
Each compute node in the AI Factory is a substantial machine:
- Eight NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs
- Two 64-core AMD EPYC processors and 1.2 TB of system memory
- An 83 TB NVMe storage array for fast access to models and data
- 400 Gbps NVIDIA networking between nodes
One interface, many models
The AI Factory offers several AI models through a single interface, so one platform can support a wide range of work:
- Conversational AI and digital assistants
- Advanced reasoning and agent-style workflows that complete multi-step tasks
- Software development and coding assistance
- Computer vision and document analysis
- Speech-to-text and transcription
- Enterprise search and retrieval over your own documents
The platform is compatible with the OpenAI and Anthropic programming interfaces. Applications already built for those services can usually be pointed at the AI Factory without being rewritten, which keeps the move to local hosting simple.
Load tested before launch
Before opening the AI Factory to customers, FirstCore.AI ran sustained tests with many requests at once, to see how it behaves under real working conditions rather than in a demo:
- First-token response times of about 0.7 to 2.1 seconds across chat and vision models under load
- More than 270 simultaneous requests handled without errors
- Embedding models processing between 65 and 80 requests per second
The aim, Ainslie says, was to answer a practical question: can a business rely on the platform once AI becomes part of its daily operations?
What it means for FirstNet customers
Sovereign AI is the fifth layer of the FirstNet stack. Because the AI Factory runs inside FirstNet’s own data centre, it sits next to the connectivity, cloud, security and voice services that many customers already use. Data from your private cloud, your call recordings or your document stores can be used by AI without leaving South Africa, and one provider is accountable for the whole path.
Learn more about the AI Factory and GPU inference, see all Sovereign AI services, or browse answers about sovereign AI in the Knowledge Hub.
Source: First Technology launches secure local AI alternative, MyBroadband.