SINGAPORE – 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 memoranda of understanding with academia, industry players and AI startups.
Chief executive of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo unit Bill Chang 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 Nvidia H100 GPU chips, which are 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 chips, 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.
Furthermore, Mr Chang noted that aside from having sufficient GPU capacity, the telco can also ensure fast and secure connections for its customers as it has access
