Short answer
No. FirstCoreAI's private AI assistants run on the Sovereign AI Factory, and inference runs on GPUs in FirstNet's South African data centre, operated by FirstCoreAI. Your prompts, documents and outputs are processed and stay in the country.
In detail
The assistants are secure chat and document tools that work with your own knowledge, with nothing sent offshore. By contrast, sending customer records or call recordings to an offshore AI API is a cross-border transfer, with POPIA consent and breach questions attached.
Details worth knowing:
- FirstCoreAI owns and operates the GPU cluster, and it runs on networks FirstNet operates.
- Models are open-weight and hosted locally, so you are not locked into a foreign platform.
- Access uses OAuth2 client credentials and short-lived bearer tokens, and each request is validated.
- Frontier models from overseas labs are optional. If a workload is routed to one, FirstCoreAI tells you plainly that the request would leave the country.
This is what makes the approach POPIA-aligned by design, and it removes foreign-jurisdiction and data-export concerns before rollout starts.
Source: FirstNet AI Adoption & Enablement service page →
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