Moroccan Digital-Physical Factory

Morocco's pursuit of digital and knowledge sovereignty requires a foundational pyramid of capacities: physical infrastructure, processing, semantic representation, cultural identity, and governance, that cannot be built simultaneously without prohibitive capital expenditure. This paper proposes a phased, low-capital-first implementation pathway for what we term the Moroccan Digital-Physical Factory, beginning with regionally hosted or Morocco-resident cloud computing rather than nationally owned data-center construction, and deferring sovereign physical infrastructure to a later maturation stage. The framework is grounded in Morocco's existing institutional landscape, including the national high-performance computing capacity operated by Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), the government's 2025-2030 Cloud First roadmap under the Digital Morocco 2030 strategy, and emerging sovereign data-center investment such as the EcoDar facility in Dakhla. The processing layer (classification, clustering, retrieval) and the cultural-identity layer (Moroccan-language and dialectal corpora) are identified as the highest-leverage, lowest-cost entry points for independent researchers and small institutions, while infrastructure and governance layers are approached through partnership and policy engagement rather than direct construction. The paper closes with a five-phase roadmap, a discussion of associated risks, and a research agenda for empirical validation. OSF Preregistration: 10.17605/OSF.IO/253KJ