Singtel putting together the pieces of a telco AI strategySingtel putting together the pieces of a telco AI strategy

Singtel pieces together its AI strategy, partnering with Nvidia to meet enterprise needs while investing for regional digital growth.

Robert Clark, Contributing Editor

January 23, 2025

2 Min Read
Singtel headquarters with its logo in Singapore
(Source: towfiqu Barbhuiya/Alamy Stock Photo)

The tech year has begun with a bang thanks to the unleashing of the Stargate project, said to be worth as much as $500 billion. While the tech world is absorbing the news, the data center sector is already awash in a deluge of hyperscaler cash. Alphabet, for example, spent $13 billion on capex in the third quarter; Meta has forecast full-year capex of $38 billion to $40 billion.

The scale of this spending overshadows the digital infrastructure owned and operated by telcos. To give a sense of this shift, software firm Microsoft now spends more of its revenue on capex than Verizon. Last year, around 25% of Microsoft’s topline income went to its infrastructure budget. Verizon's capex in comparison has shrunk to below 15%.

The task for telcos is to find where to invest, and who to partner with, to take advantage of the AI-driven computing boom.

Singtel is one operator that is putting into place a strategy that serves its enterprise customers' AI needs and gives itself a chance to meet future growth. As a telco in a small city-state surrounded by high-growth emerging markets, it may not be typical, but it is a useful study.

Data center deals

One move has been to deploy GPU as a service in partnership with Nvidia, which has been extended to the rest of southeast Asia through Bridge, a regional telco alliance that began as a roaming platform. The service means small and developing market operators can now access Nvidia GPUs for their enterprise customers.

Singtel introduced its AI cloud service through another partnership in October, this time with Silicon Valley firm Scale AI, aimed at allowing enterprises to deploy and scale up their GenAI applications.

On the data center side, it has struck a series of deals, notably including the sale of a stake in its data center spinoff Nxera to KKR. Nxera is now pushing across southeast Asia, where it sees demand driven by data sovereignty, AI computing and data analytics. It expects to more than triple its capacity to 155MW by 2026 and to grow to 200MW by 2030.

Analyst firm ABI said in a research note that after several tough years Singtel has "embraced the challenge" of pivoting from telco to techco. "Singtel has been putting in place essential solutions and resources to address the needs of a number of enterprise verticals," it noted.

A critical piece has been the Paragon orchestration platform, which had drawn heavy investment from the telco, leading to speculation it had "overreached," ABI said. But it believed the investment would pay off — "especially as the solution can provide an 'on ramp' for edge compute/AI compute processing and other value-added services" that Singtel can deliver. 

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About the Author

Robert Clark

Contributing Editor, Light Reading

Robert Clark is an independent technology editor and researcher based in Hong Kong. 

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