OCS and Digital Parks Africa Team Up to Expand Enterprise AI Infrastructure in South Africa

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.

Although the two companies have maintained a long-standing partnership, DPA has now installed a dedicated AI pod for OCS at its Samrand facility. The site also has redundant connectivity to OCS’s Teraco location, where the company provides other cloud services and connectivity to customers.

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.”

– Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant, Data Sciences Corporation

OCS currently offers AI-as-a-Service and GPU-as-a-Service to organisations and is also piloting additional technologies to support enterprise AI adoption.

“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.”

– Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant, Data Sciences Corporation

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.”

– Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant, Data Sciences Corporation

Building AI infrastructure beyond GPUs

Raymond said businesses need more than graphics processing units (GPUs) and large language models (LLMs) to build effective AI systems, pointing to the importance of network architecture, storage and technical expertise.

“One of the huge oversights that almost every company seems to make when they kick off their AI journey is that they just go out and buy several GPUs. The problem is that if the AI solution isn’t architected correctly and they don’t have the right levels of high-speed networking and storage, they can’t take full advantage of their investments. People very often miss that architectural leap when they begin these AI journeys, and that’s something we provide out of the gate. Another major value proposition for us is that we provide very skilled engineers on call. We design on enterprise-first technologies, but critically, spend time with our customers helping them build out their cloud and AI journeys. For security and isolation, when we onboard our larger clients, we can create their own private, bespoke isolated network that becomes an extension of their own network. We are listed on the Teraco Cloud Exchange as one of the cloud vendors alongside the likes of Azure and AWS,” he says. “Because we offer enterprise support for our customers as well, they know they’ll typically have direct lines into the teams they need access to.”

– Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant, Data Sciences Corporation

OCS also says its locally hosted infrastructure enables it to offer pricing in South African rand, reducing customers’ exposure to foreign currency fluctuations.

“Because we purchase the technology and we deploy it all here, we’re not linked to any international currency and exchange rates, and we don’t have variable pricing from one day to the next. We capex the hardware, and we know all the costs of our licensed products upfront, preconfigured and built into our costing model. So we are able to offer predictability in the pricing.”

– Richard Raymond, Senior Engineering Consultant, Data Sciences Corporation

The partnership adds dedicated AI infrastructure to OCS’s existing cloud services and reflects growing enterprise interest in locally hosted AI environments that address data sovereignty, security and compliance requirements.

Source:TechAfrica News