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SoleCrypt and hosted·ai partner in launch of North Africa's first AI Factory

October 21, 2026

With hosted·ai as a partner, SoleCrypt will bring North Africa’s first purpose-built AI factory to market, delivering 40 MW of GPU capacity in Bizerte, Tunisia to enterprises, startups and researchers across North Africa, MENA and international markets

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At NVIDIA GTC Europe, 2026, SoleCrypt - a Tunisian British developer of sustainable digital infrastructure, announced the new SoleCrypt AI Campus in Bizerte, Tunisia - North Africa’s first purpose-built AI factory and a defining moment for sovereign AI infrastructure across the MENA region. We're excited to reveal that hosted·ai has been chosen as an ecosystem partner for the new AI factory.

SoleCrypt will deliver a 40 MW AI campus, beginning with a 7 MW Phase 1 deployment designed around the NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 platform, with hosted·ai bringing the campus’s GPU capacity to market through our GPU Commerce Platform - translating high-density AI infrastructure into accessible cloud services for enterprises, startups and research organisations across North Africa, MENA and international markets.

Coming online in early 2028, the SoleCrypt campus will deliver industrial-scale AI compute capacity where it has never existed before: built in Africa, for Africa. For too long, organizations across North Africa and MENA have exported their most valuable assets, data, talent, and economic value, to Europe or the Gulf simply to access advanced AI compute. The SoleCrypt AI Campus ends that dependency. This is sovereign infrastructure built to transform the region from an AI consumer into an AI producer, enabling more of that value to be created, retained, and scaled within Africa.

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A Connected Production Facility for the AI Era

The campus is engineered from the ground up as an AI factory: production infrastructure purpose-built for continuous AI token generation, model training, and inference at scale. Phase 1 deploys 1,728 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs in HGX Rubin NVL8 systems across high-density liquid-cooled racks - a confirmed 415V AC power architecture, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and a Tier III+ equivalent resilience target to support sustained AI workloads.

Bizerte, the northernmost city in Africa, sits 3.6 km by routed fiber path from the Medusa subsea cable landing, providing a high-capacity link connecting North Africa to Marseille and European research and commercial networks. This carrier-neutral international backbone delivers resilient, low-latency connectivity to European and global markets, positioning Tunisia as the digital bridge between African demand and Mediterranean and European networks.

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Sustainable by Design

SoleCrypt will become a net contributor of new renewable electricity to Tunisia’s national grid, powered by a dedicated 60 MW solar and BESS project in the Tozeur. The strategy is deliberately designed to pair the growth of AI compute with the development of new renewable capacity to make high-performance AI and environmental responsibility mutually reinforcing objectives, not competing ones.

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Sovereign AI and a Proven Demand Ecosystem

What sets SoleCrypt apart is the proven ecosystem behind it. Shareholder Karim Beguir co-founded InstaDeep in Tunis, building it from a local startup into a globally significant AI research company acquired by BioNTech. Shareholders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani founded Expensya in Tunis and scaled it to over 6,000 customers across 100 countries before its acquisition by Medius.

CEO Amir Ben-Gacem serves on the Investment Committee of Tunisia’s ANAVA Fund of Funds, and has longstanding experience across the country’s venture capital and startup ecosystem. Tunisia has already proven it can produce world-class AI companies. The SoleCrypt AI Campus gives the next generation of founders the infrastructure to build and scale at an industrial level.

The Bizerte Campus delivers what Tunisia’s next wave of AI founders needs most: the opportunity for sovereign compute they can access, trust, and build on. By anchoring accelerated computing capacity inside the country, SoleCrypt enables founders to create products, generate high-value employment, and retain intellectual property within Tunisia, directly preventing a brain drain that has cost the region a generation of talent.

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“Every design decision, from accelerated computing, to cooling and power, has been made to support an environmentally sustainable, large-scale AI production,” said Amir Ben-Gacem, CEO and Co-Founder of SoleCrypt. “We are designing a facility to meet the requirements of leading AI infrastructure deployments globally, and an ecosystem of founders who know exactly what to do with it.”
Amir Ben-Gacem, CEO and Co-Founder, SoleCrypt

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A Partnership Ecosystem

The SoleCrypt AI Campus is delivered through a carefully assembled consortium of industry leaders:

  • hosted·ai: bringing the GPU capacity to market, translating high-density AI infrastructure into accessible cloud services for enterprises, startups and research organisations across North Africa, MENA and international markets.
  • Maerifa Solutions: an NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) Solution Provider Partner specializing in AI infrastructure solutions. Maerifa Solutions led the AI factory infrastructure architecture for the SoleCrypt campus, bringing expertise in GPU cluster design, high-density computing and infrastructure scalability to support the campus’s performance requirements and long-term growth.
  • Sterling & Wilson Data Center (SWDC): one of the World’s leading Data Center EPC specialists with 30+ cutting-edge Data Center projects delivered across India, GCC and Africa since 2015. The company has successfully executed projects in Egypt, Ghana, DR Congo, Angola and Saudi Arabia, setting new benchmarks in speed, scale, and reliability.
  • Schneider Electric: a key technology advisor, supplying AI data center reference architectures co-developed with NVIDIA, alongside medium- and low-voltage electrification solutions, secure power systems, liquid cooling, and intelligent infrastructure management through EcoStruxure IT.
  • Meinhardt: providing independent technical review and assurance, supported by extensive global experience in multidisciplinary engineering and mission-critical data centre design.
  • Supermicro: holding 70-80% market share in Direct Liquid Cooling AI infrastructure and a premier NVIDIA partner since 2009, leads the industry in speed-to-market for GPU-optimized systems.

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About SoleCrypt

Launched in 2022, SoleCrypt is a UK-headquartered, Tunisia-first infrastructure developer focused on AI data centres and grid-connected renewable energy. The company is developing the Bizerte AI Campus alongside a 60 MW solar and BESS project in Tozeur, with a model designed to pair new compute demand with new renewable generation.

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