Singtel, Singapore’s largest telecoms company, is continuing its push to become more than just a mobile network provider with a new “center of excellence,” established with U.S. chip giant Nvidia.
Targeted for launch in June, the center will help firms who care about data sovereignty, such as banks, hospitals and government enterprises. These organizations may prefer to process this data locally, rather than housing it in servers based outside the country.
“AI is becoming more embedded in decision-making, and government entities and enterprises… need assurance that their data is protected,” Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Digital Infraco, the firm’s business unit which manages its data centers, said during a press briefing on Feb. 24.
The new research center will help design future data centers with power densities between 600 kW and 1 MW—up to 100 times more than the average data center—and assemble an ecosystem of model makers and app developers to assist businesses in scaling their AI use.
Nvidia said its Singtel partnership was part of a drive to deepen its presence in global AI research. “Chips are just the second layer of the cake, the third layer that you need is AI infrastructure,” said Marc Hamilton, Nvidia’s vice-president of solutions architecture and engineering, at the center’s launch in Singapore.
