Oxide Cloud Services, a subsidiary of Data Sciences Corporation, has installed a dedicated AI pod at Digital Parks Africa’s Samrand data centre in Centurion, as it expands enterprise AI services aimed at organisations that want their AI workloads kept in South Africa.
The Tier III facility provides up to 260kW per pod and up to 50kW per rack — more than 10 times what a traditional data centre typically offers, according to the companies. The pod has redundant connectivity to OCS’s site at Teraco, where it runs other cloud services.
Sovereignty as the selling point
Richard Raymond, senior engineering consultant at Data Sciences Corporation, said demand is growing from financial services firms, insurers and telcos for AI infrastructure that isn’t routed through international public clouds.
“Our local cloud is fully South African hosted, built and designed for local enterprises,” he said, adding that customers’ data and intellectual property stay in the country.
OCS offers GPU and AI as a service, letting customers run entire AI pipelines in one place — GPUs alongside high-speed networking, tiered storage for retrieval and data-processing workloads, and supporting software. Raymond said a typical use is a company chatbot trained on the organisation’s own data and processes.
“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,” he said.
More than GPUs
Raymond said the most common mistake companies make is buying GPUs without the networking and storage to use them properly.
“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,” he said.
OCS can build larger clients their own isolated network as an extension of their existing infrastructure, and is listed on the Teraco Cloud Exchange alongside Azure and AWS. Data Sciences Corporation is an NVIDIA Registered Partner.
Rand pricing
Because it buys and deploys its hardware locally, OCS prices in rand rather than dollars. “We’re not linked to any international currency and exchange rates, and we don’t have variable pricing from one day to the next,” Raymond said.
