Oxide Cloud Services (OCS), a subsidiary of Data Sciences Corporation, is expanding its enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) services in South Africa through a collaboration with Digital Parks Africa (DPA), which has provided the company with a dedicated AI pod at its Tier III data centre in Samrand, Centurion.
The facility will support OCS in deploying enterprise AI infrastructure and meeting growing demand for sovereign AI services, allowing organisations to run AI workloads locally without relying on international public infrastructure.
According to Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant at Data Sciences Corporation, the collaboration strengthens OCS’s AI service offering and enables it to respond more quickly to changing enterprise requirements.
The Samrand data centre was selected for its power capacity, offering 260kW for an AI pod and up to 50kW per rack, which the company says is more than 10 times the traditional data centre power availability.
Raymond said the partnership supports OCS’s AI enablement framework, which provides AI services to enterprises across sectors including financial services, insurance and telecommunications.
“Our collaboration underpins OCS’s AI enablement framework, through which we provide AI services to leading enterprises such as financial services companies, insurers and telcos. A key – and growing – demand we see in the market is for a sovereign AI enablement platform that allows organisations to build their own AI, manage their own AI workloads or leverage OCS AI services without having to be routed through international, public infrastructure.”
“Our local cloud is fully South African hosted, built and designed for local enterprises. That means no data or IP leave South Africa’s borders. We offer our customers the ability to build their own AI solutions with access to ‘ready to go’ AI-enabling technologies. A customer can deploy entire AI pipelines in one place. Not just LLMs on GPUs, but high-bandwidth, low-latency networking services to keep the GPUs fed, multiple storage tiers for any RAG and ETL requirements and several key software services to stitch it all together.”
“This enables customers to build solutions such as their own sovereign AI chatbots, trained on their organisation’s actual information, data and processes, and therefore understand their business requirements. We see absolutely massive demand for this, as every major enterprise is trying to enable their teams and launch innovative new services using AI. But compliance and security are top concerns for them.”
“Our AI as a service and GPU as a service have been providing AI capabilities to several organisations for several years. We are also piloting several new technologies that promise to further improve any organisation’s AI adoption – so stay tuned.”
Data Sciences Corporation has more than a decade of experience providing enterprise IT services to major organisations in South Africa. Its technology partnerships, including its registered partner status with Nvidia, position it to develop AI hardware infrastructure designed to meet enterprise requirements.
The company is also expanding its software services to help businesses use AI infrastructure without having to manage all the underlying technical complexity.
“As we expand the offering, we are also layering on the software services that are often necessary to get teams consuming the services at the level they need, rather than being stuck in the plumbing. The DPA offering has aligned with our vision, giving us the power and the space we need to grow and support our customers in the AI era.”
