Singtel launches AI cloud service, taps edge as home-grown player

It can help sensitive sectors like banking, healthcare that need to process data locally

Sensitive sectors, such as banking and healthcare, as well as the public sector, will soon be able to tap telco giant Singtel's artificial intelligence (AI) cloud offering.

The company launched its offering, called RE:AI, on Oct 10 at its George Street office, along with five memorandums of understanding with academia, industry players and AI start-ups.

Mr Bill Chang, chief executive of Singtel's Digital InfraCo unit, said at a media briefing that unlike other cloud players that may bring AI hardware to Singapore, the company has the advantage of being a home-grown player that is focused on the local market.

He noted that companies with sensitive use cases, such as those in the banking and healthcare sectors, need to process their data locally.

"Would they want to put this (data) with a non-Singaporean player who's got GPUs here, or with a Singaporean player who's got GPUs here? That's one key question," he said.

GPUs, or graphics processing units, are used to both train and run AI models. As part of RE:AI, Singtel is offering access to the Nvidia H100 GPU chip, which is one of the fastest chips on the market now.

As Nvidia updates its chips, Mr Chang said that the company is committed to bringing the latest chips, such as the upcoming Nvidia GB200 GPU chip, to market as well.

"If you think about the challenge of these cloud players, they cannot just think about Singapore; they have to think about their global data centres," he said, adding that as a national AI factory of sorts, Singtel will be able to move faster to adopt new technologies.