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Singtel's new AI cloud platform for enterprises highlights different paths to AI by Asian telcos.
Singtel continues its brisk buildout of one of the telco world's broadest AI portfolios. It has just unveiled its AI cloud service platform, dubbed RE:AI and described as “democratizing AI to make it widely available” to enterprise and public sector users.
According to the operator's press release, it's a turnkey AI platform that combines compute infrastructure such as GPU and storage with networks and will be delivered through Singtel’s Paragon orchestration platform.
Bill Chang, head of Singtel subsidiary Digital InfraCo, said the high costs, long lead times and complexities of deploying Nvidia GPUs had deterred enterprises from adopting AI.
"With the launch of RE:AI, we’re significantly reducing entry barriers, making AI easily accessible to enterprises, government agencies, research communities and academia," he said.
The latest announcement builds on Singtel's deal with Nvidia, announced in August, to sell GPU as a service, and its related partnerships with Bridge Alliance, GMI and Nscale.
It's an enterprise-centric strategy, which makes sense for a big regional finance and commercial hub, especially for a government-backed operator that needs to align with national priorities.
Varied approaches
But it also highlights the varied approaches taken by AI-forward telcos in Asia.
Korea's SK Telecom has a 'pyramid strategy' involving data centers, AI transformation and AI services such as its Korean language intelligent agent. It's made a string of investments including chip firm Sapeon and into Silicon Valley genAI startups Perplexity and Anthropic. It has also gone into the GPUaaS business with Lambda as its partner.
Rival KT Corp has also released its own GenAI-based services and has just signed a $1.8 billion partnership with Microsoft to develop Korean language models.
In Japan, mobile operator SoftBank Corp is a support player in the group's grand strategy of becoming a global AI leader. Leader Masayoshi Son has declared that all of his past investments were just a "warm up" for the AI opportunity.
This year SoftBank Corp, like SKT, has teamed up with Perplexity for GenAI and is building a huge AI data center on the site of an old Sharp factory.
AI data centers have certainly attracted the biggest share of telco investment and attention. That applies to Singtel, too, which has pulled off a series of swift deals in the past year, including the sale of a piece of its business to KKR, as it has raised cash and broadened its regional footprint.
Right now its AI strategy looks to be the most focused and synergistic.
As Omdia analyst Brian Washburn told Light Reading recently, the key in enterprise AI is customers buying broad service bundles – hosting, network, managed services, AI cloud – and achieving aggregation and scale. That's where Singtel is at.
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