The first markets to benefit from the NVIDIA-powered platform will be Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia
Singtel has formed a strategic partnership with Bridge Alliance to roll out GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) across southeast Asia. The Bridge Alliance is a consortium of 35 mobile operators worldwide.
The Alliance and Singtel plan to offer GPUaaS to enterprises in markets including Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia via leading operators AIS, Maxis and Telkomsel, respectively.
At launch, Singtel’s GPUaaS will be powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU-powered clusters. Singtel will also be among the world’s first to launch NVIDIA’s next-generation GB200 AI Servers.
The service will be expanded to run in new sustainable, hyper-connected, AI-ready data centres by Nxera, Singtel’s regional data centre business, across Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia when they begin operations from mid-2025 onwards.
Plan into action
In February, Singtel announced it would launch GPUaaS later this year to offer enterprises access to NVIDIA’s AI computing power so they can deploy AI at scale quickly and affordably.
According to a Kearney report, Racing toward the future: artificial intelligence in Southeast Asia, published in 2020, adopting AI could contribute nearly $1 trillion to the southeast Asia region.
Recognising the importance of AI, regional governments have launched national AI roadmaps to harness the technology responsibly and to its fullest potential.
As part of the agreement, Bridge Alliance member operators will gain access to the GPUaaS from Singtel. As the countries’ need for AI grows, more GPU clusters will be launched in those countries to accelerate and scale the businesses.
Bridge Alliance says it will assist its members in fast-tracking their go-to-market strategies and help them successfully offer GPUaaS to enterprises.
Heartening news
Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo unit, said, “We are very heartened to see such strong interest from AIS, Maxis and Telkomsel to partner us in our GPUaaS offerings.”
Through its patented Paragon platform, Singtel was the first telco to bring AI to the 5G edge in the 5G@Sentosa trials for Singapore government agencies. Paragon orchestrated a multi-edge compute and NVIDIA GPU environment while enabling customers to deploy 5G use cases at speed and at scale.
“With more telcos deploying 5G network services, we see this real-time AI offering powered by GPUaaS at 5G edge at low latencies as a key growth driver for their enterprise businesses,” Chang added.