Short answer
Yes. Sovereign does not mean isolated: FirstCoreAI, FirstNet's AI business unit, runs open-weight models in South Africa by default, and frontier APIs from overseas labs can be used where a workload justifies it. FirstCoreAI tells you plainly when a request would leave the country.
In detail
Most workloads run well on the open-weight models hosted on the AI Factory in FirstNet's South African data centre. The live catalogue includes an 80B mixture-of-experts coding model, a 31B general chat model, vision-language, speech-to-text, multilingual embeddings and a retrieval reranker.
How the choice is made:
- Every model on the AI Factory is benchmarked on the same hardware against frontier APIs for accuracy, latency, concurrency and cost per unit of work, so you see the evidence before committing.
- Frontier routing is optional, and you get notice when a request goes offshore.
- The decision is made per workload, so sensitive data such as customer records or call recordings can stay on local models while frontier APIs are reserved for workloads that justify them.
This lets you keep sensitive processing inside South Africa, with rand-denominated costs, without giving up access to frontier models where they genuinely add value.
Source: FirstNet Sovereign AI service page →
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