Singtel continues ‘AI democratisation’ push with new cloud platform

• Singaporean operator launches RE:AI, an artificial intelligence cloud service (AI cloud) platform
• The aim is to ease “friction points” among enterprises and the public sector when it comes to harnessing AI
• AI obstacles include high costs and long lead times for graphics processing units
• Singtel has signed MoUs with various partners across academia, manufacturing and the AI app developer community to develop the AI cloud platform
• RE:AI is part of Singtel’s ongoing efforts to establish Singapore as a regional AI hub

Singaporean operator Singtel, a keen AI adopter and facilitator, has unveiled its artificial intelligence cloud service (AI cloud) platform, dubbed RE:AI. The idea is to make AI technologies more readily accessible by industry verticals, enterprises, public sector organisations and academia without “having to worry about the overheads of complex infrastructure”.

Singtel pitches RE:AI as a “turnkey AI development and deployment platform”, which combines AI compute infrastructure, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and storage, alongside AI workspaces and tools. Through the use of Paragon, Singtel’s in-house developed orchestration platform, AI cloud can integrate with fixed and mobile networks and, with an eye on the future, “quantum-safe networks”.   

Bill Chang, CEO of Digital InfraCo, Singtel’s standalone infrastructure unit, talked up AI cloud as a spur for innovation, enabling customers to deploy, manage and scale their AI applications in an affordable way. He flagged high costs and long lead times for GPUs, as well as the need for special environments to host them due to their intense energy usage, as some of the “key friction points” for many enterprises and public sector customers when it comes to bringing AI into their operations. A lack of AI talent, he said, was another obstacle.

"With the launch of RE:AI, we’re significantly reducing entry barriers, making AI easily accessible to enterprises, government agencies, research communities and academia,” said Chang. “The more people have access to AI, the more innovation is bound to emerge which, in turn, fuels growth. RE:AI will foster a dynamic ecosystem of partners with distinctive capabilities and platforms to accelerate AI adoption to drive innovation and growth in Singapore and the region, sustainably.”

Acknowledging that development of the AI cloud platform will need collaboration with customers from different backgrounds with varying requirements, Singtel has signed individual memorandum of understandings (MoUs) with various partners across academia, manufacturing and from within the AI app developer community (details about those partnerships can be found in the footnotes of Singtel’s RE:AI announcement).

Moreover, with the aim of establishing Singapore as a regional AI hub, Singtel RE:AI has signed an MoU with Digital Industry Singapore to launch an AI accelerator programme to help AI tech companies establish, develop and scale up their operations. Singtel’s ambition is to build a “vibrant AI ecosystem” on the island.

Digital InfraCo, “in keeping with Singtel’s net zero 2045 goals”, signed an MoU last week with GoNetZero, a decarbonisation solution provider, to explore integration of its platform with RE:AI offerings.

On the road to AI democratisation

RE:AI is the latest in a long series of recent Singtel initiatives to accelerate digital transformation for enterprises through greater availability of scalable AI solutions.

Earlier this month, the operator further advanced its GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) strategy ahead of its planned commercial launch later this year by agreeing a partnership with GMI Cloud, a GPUaaS specialist that is already offering services from datacentres in Asia Pacific. 

Prior to that, Singtel announced a collaboration with AI cloud platform company Nscale to leverage Nscale’s AMD and Nvidia’s GPU capacity in Europe, while Nscale will be able to tap into Singtel’s Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU capacity in the South-east Asian region for its customers’ workloads through an integration with Paragon.

Singtel also recently announced a strategic partnership with network operator industry group Bridge Alliance that will enable it to offer its GPUaaS offerings to enterprises across South-east Asia via the alliance’s members.

Earlier this year, it announced a similar partnership with US-based Vultr, which operates 32 cloud datacentre locations globally, including nine across the Asia Pacific region (as well as locations throughout the Americas, Europe, Israel and South Africa), and which already offers Nvidia-based infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads in Singapore, India, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

​​- Ken Wieland, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV