Our vision is for Aotearoa New Zealand to achieve full digital sovereignty in the age of Artificial Intelligence. We are building a future where our most critical technology—the infrastructure for AI—is owned by us, governed by our laws, and aligned with our values as a nation.

This platform will be a permanent national asset, like our power grid or transport network, ensuring New Zealand’s researchers, government, and innovators can build the future without sacrificing our economic independence or cultural integrity.

We are at an inflection point. AI is no longer just a research tool; it is critical infrastructure. However, our nation lacks a commercially viable, sovereign, production-grade platform for AI.

Currently, researchers and innovators must often navigate a gap. This gap exists between:

1. Foreign-owned "hyperscaler" platforms, which can expose sensitive health, economic, or taonga data to foreign laws like the US CLOUD Act.
2. Traditional HPC systems, which are vital for deep research but are often not designed for the rapid, SLA-backed path from research to commercial production.

Our Catalyst Sovereign AI Platform fills this gap, offering a "Third Way" — a single, trusted platform for the entire research and innovation lifecycle.

We are building the "Third Way." A sovereign AI platform and solution that uniquely combines:

World-Class Sovereign AI: A world-class AI platform, legally and physically domiciled in Aotearoa, that enables the training of foundational (large) and specialist models, parameter tuning, and the execution of high-performance-computing jobs.

Sovereignty, Collaboration, Respect by Design: Our open source values and principles support self determination, sovereignty and collaboration. We support and respect te Tiriti o Waitangi and are committed bringing te ao Māori into our work and to improving our relationship with tangata whenua. We support the work of Te Kahui Raraunga and in particular their Māori AI Governance Framework.

Commercial-Grade Operations: Backed by our proven, SLA-backed, multi-tenant, “whole-product” cloud services that allows researchers, government, and businesses to move seamlessly from research to production on a single, trusted platform. Catalyst.NET provides the research software engineering capability that transforms this infrastructure into a complete research platform.

AI Trust and Safety: The platform will be built with essential guardrails, auditable tooling, and expert guidance from the ground up. Our design will ensure AI development is safe, transparent, and aligned with New Zealand's democratic values, guided by Māori AI Governance and Data Principles and international best practices like the OECD AI Principles.

This vision is backed by Catalyst Cloud's proven track record and unique assets:

NZ's Sovereign Cloud: We are the only NZ-owned, All-of-Government (AoG) attested cloud services provider. We already host many of NZ's mission-critical systems and provide resources to many research institutions.

Builders, Not Resellers: Our world-class engineering team includes core contributors to the foundational open-source technologies (like Kubernetes and OpenStack) that power global cloud and AI infrastructure. We have the deep technical expertise required to build and manage this platform, not simply reselling a foreign product.

New Zealand's research organisations are world-class. By leveraging shared access to production-grade research software infrastructure— ML pipelines, GPU schedulers, data management tools, and experiment frameworks that modern AI research demands—they could focus on research excellence and achieve even more.

For 28 years, Catalyst IT has partnered with research institutions across Aotearoa to co-create exactly this capability. We bring deep research software engineering expertise and an expanding network of research and technology partners. More than that, we bring a vision: a shared ecosystem where tools built once benefit everyone, where economies of scale replace duplication, and where New Zealand's research community becomes genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.

You bring the research excellence and domain knowledge. Catalyst Cloud provides the sovereign, world-class cloud infrastructure. Catalyst IT offers the strategic capability that connects these pieces—building, maintaining, and supporting the software layer that makes sovereign infrastructure genuinely useful for research.

Open source provides the path forward: instead of each institution independently solving the same infrastructure and software enablement challenges, we can build a true research software commons where New Zealand owns and controls its technical future. Together, we can build the kind of research ecosystem that puts New Zealand at the forefront of sovereign AI research globally.

Our goal is to create a permanent, self-funding national asset that ends the cycle of perpetual subsidy. This asset will be structured with a clear path to a public listing on the NZX. This creates a trusted, liquid investment vehicle for all New Zealanders—including KiwiSaver providers, infrastructure funds, and, most importantly, Iwi investment funds—to take a permanent, long-term ownership stake.

This is an invitation to build Aotearoa's next great piece of national infrastructure. We are seeking to engage with Crown agencies, research leaders, Iwi, and New Zealand investors to co-design the charter for this platform.

Here are the specific ways you can help bring this vision to reality:

Beyond these specific roles, your public support is invaluable.

If you believe in this vision, please write us a supporting letter. A simple statement outlining why this national asset matters to you or your organisation has tremendous power. It helps us demonstrate the broad national alignment—to Government, investors, and partners—required to bring this vision to life.

We are collecting expressions of support to send to Government, or you can contact us directly via aiseed@catalystcloud.nz.

Let us partner to build a permanent national asset that secures Aotearoa's digital independence for generations to come.