For decades, a business or government office in Papua New Guinea that wanted cloud storage had one real option: rent space overseas. That changed Friday in Port Moresby, when Telikom subsidiary Datec PNG switched on Kumul Cloud Infinity, which the company calls the country’s first sovereign cloud and AI platform.
Datec built the cloud with CloudSigma. It runs on Nvidia H200 GPUs for AI processing, alongside hardware from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Datec hasn’t said how much data the platform can hold, but it did explain how the infrastructure stays running. Grid power carries the main load, while UPS systems and diesel generators cover backup, and a partnership with Geogas PNG handles gas power. Cooling systems, meanwhile, keep the setup stable through sustained workloads.
Telikom Group CEO Amos Tepi laid out the real problem in a weekend LinkedIn post. Since digital technology arrived in PNG, he said, foreign providers have rented out nearly all of the country’s cloud storage and computing to local institutions. As a result, banks, hospitals, universities and government offices had no real control over where their data sat, which laws governed it, or how quickly it came back after an outage.
Datec PNG chairman Moses Maladina said the launch gives PNG a homegrown cloud option for the first time, one capable of running AI workloads and storing sensitive data locally for government bodies, state enterprises and private companies. Tepi, for his part, called it a “credible national response” to years of leaning on cloud infrastructure based outside the country.
Port Moresby won’t be the only site, either. Maladina confirmed in March that Datec plans a second cloud facility in Lae to back up the network if the first one goes down, though the company hasn’t announced a timeline for that project.
Whether this actually pulls PNG institutions away from foreign cloud providers is still unclear. What’s changed, at least, is simpler: for the first time, they have a local one to choose instead.
