The forgotten side of the island shouldn't be the last to own its own AI.
On a 42-minute call, a West Side nonprofit founder laid out the problem and the plan in one breath: $645,000 for AI in Hawaiʻi's community colleges went to two campuses on the tourist side of the island; the last hurricane knocked out power for four days and every cloud-dependent agent stopped; and a local plumber was about to buy a second computer because he will not put his clients' data in someone else's cloud. Everything NGARi builds exists for exactly this.
What we heard
"I'm on the west side of uh Hawaii which is you know the forgotten side."
— Pacific Forward Initiative"Hawaii got 645,000 to help AI in community colleges but all the all that money went to two community colleges on the east side, you know, in the tourist area. But there's a lot of hunger here on the west side — a lot of people just need the opportunity, need the skills, and need the infrastructure."
— Pacific Forward Initiative"The last hurricane knocked out power for four days… all my AI models, all the agents I run, totally stopped."
— Pacific Forward Initiative"I see compute being like a public resource."
— Pacific Forward Initiative"If we can say that we've got our own local compute, you can come look at it… this is where your data is going to stay."
— On a client who refused the cloud, and was about to buy a second computer to stay off itQuoted from a partnership planning call, 29 Sep 2026.
The build
1 · Community compute utility
One node on the West Side that serves the coast first: queued free compute for students, job-seekers and neighbours, run by someone local. It is a working public utility — and the evidence that unlocks county and state funding.
2 · Café & small-business nodes
On-premises AI in the places people already gather. The café that brings customers in with it. The plumber who keeps every client record on his own machine. The shop that pays for maintenance instead of another seat licence.
3 · High-school AI engineering pathway
Skills and physical hardware together. Students learn on a real node, not a browser tab, so they can say what the credential actually means: "I'm an AI engineer because I got the skills and I've actually worked on it."
4 · Island resilience
Solar-ready, offline-capable, auditable. A hurricane, a grid failure or an off-island outage stops the cloud. It does not stop a box that is standing in the room.
How it starts
- Join the Trainer pathway (Pathway B). The member workspace now shows the pathway step by step — modules, the certification, the first deployment, the first cohort — instead of dropping you into a blank prompt box.
- Choose the node that fits the job. Start where the work is, and move up when the work does.
- Reserve it in installments. 0% interest; the payments add up to the list price exactly.
- We flash and configure it before it ships, so day one is a working node, not a project.
| Device | What it is for | Price | 4 monthly payments |
|---|---|---|---|
| NGARi+ Nano | One café or small business on premises; a first hands-on node | $999 | 4 × $249.75 |
| NGARi+ Orin | The one to learn and teach on — runs the same models as the workspace | $4,999 | 4 × $1,249.75 |
| NGARi+ Thor | The fleet box: several sites, or queued public compute for the coast | $8,999 | 4 × $2,249.75 |
2-payment plans are also available (half the list price, twice). A plan is a schedule, not a discount: no interest, no fee, and the total equals the one-time price. Installment checkout is provisioned per plan; until it is live, the hardware page opens the standard checkout and your NGARi contact can set the plan up directly.
What is true today
We would rather be plain about this than let a vision page imply more than the product does.
- Your workspace is a real, isolated tenant on NGARi's own hardware, with its own key.
- Inference runs on the node. Nothing leaves the machine, and every call is written to a hash-chained audit log you can read — the receipt a business owner can actually be shown.
- Models run offline: no cloud egress, no per-seat licence, no per-token bill.
- Single node today. Multi-node and remote compute are not live yet, and the workspace says so where it matters.
- Solar-powered enclosures are in development, not shipping.
- Installment plans are priced and catalogued; live checkout activates as each plan is provisioned.
Bring it to your side of the island.
Start with the pathway and one node. Prove it in a café, a classroom or a county office — then build the utility the West Side actually owns.
NGARi builds sovereign AI on hardware you own. Not a government program; not affiliated with any government agency. Regional figures above are as described by Pacific Forward Initiative on 29 Sep 2026.