Beyond the cloud: a resilient sovereign edge architecture for vaccine independence in the Global South

The global vaccine manufacturing ecosystem is bifurcating between hyper-connected ‘Industry 4.0’ facilities and brownfield environments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) constrained by legacy infrastructure, unreliable connectivity and high bandwidth costs. This Commentary argues that achieving vaccine independence in the Global South requires an offline-first, sovereign edge architecture that enables ‘collective intelligence without data pooling’. By combining TinyML, hierarchical federated learning and stateful agentic middleware (software agents that retain persistent memory of local system states across network disruptions), LMIC manufacturers can deploy AI-driven process optimization and surveillance while retaining full data custody. Drawing on established governance blueprints such as MELLODDY and OpenSAFELY, and on emerging initiatives including CEPI’s Pandemic Preparedness Engine for Disease X, we outline how data product management units, versioned federation and byzantine-robust aggregation can align regulatory requirements with continuously learning systems. We conclude with practical next steps and highlight technical, financial and political challenges that must be addressed for sovereign, AI-enabled vaccine systems to move from pilots to field-ready infrastructure.

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