Short answer
EngineAI solutions are deployed either on the FirstCoreAI AI Factory in FirstNet's South African data centre or into your own environment, depending on what suits the workload. EngineAI is the build team of FirstCoreAI, FirstNet's AI business unit.
In detail
Most EngineAI projects run on InfraAI compute on the AI Factory, so models, data and pipelines stay in the country. Where it makes more sense, solutions can be deployed into your own environment instead.
Deployment principles:
- Build on the AI Factory or in your environment.
- Open-weight models by default, with frontier APIs only where a workload justifies them.
- Notice from FirstCoreAI whenever a request would leave South Africa.
- On the AI Factory, OpenAI-compatible APIs with OAuth2 client credentials and short-lived bearer tokens.
Running on the AI Factory keeps every inference inside the South African perimeter, on infrastructure FirstCoreAI owns and operates, with rand-denominated billing. That suits workloads where data sensitivity or cost rules out a foreign API.
A scoping call with FirstCoreAI is the place to work out which option suits your workload.
Source: FirstNet Custom AI Engineering service page →
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