Singtel and Bridge Alliance said on Monday they will extend SingTel’s GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offerings to enterprises across Southeast Asia via alliance member operators, starting with Thailand’s AIS, Malaysia’s Maxis and Indonesia’s Telkomsel.
The tie-up stems from SingTel’s announcement in February that it had joined the Nvidia Partner Network Cloud Programme and would bring Nvidia’s full-stack AI platform to enterprises across the region, enabling them to deploy AI at scale quickly and cost effectively.
Under the latest agreement, Bridge Alliance operators will gain access to Singtel’s GPUaaS offering, which will be powered at launch by Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU-powered clusters, as well as Nvidia’s next-gen GB200 AI Servers. More GPU clusters will be launched to accelerate and scale the businesses in countries where GPU demand increases.
Singtel – which is also a Bridge Alliance member – said that the service will be expanded to run in new AI-ready data centres currently being built by its regional data centre business Nxera in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia when they begin operations from mid-2025 onwards.
Bridge Alliance said it will assist alliance operators in fast-tracking their go-to-market strategies for their GPUaaS offering.
AIS, Maxis and Telkomsel are the first operators onboard to offer the service as they seek ways to cater to growing demand for AI computing in their respective markets. Citing a 2020 study from Kearney, the Bridge Alliance said that AI adoption could contribute nearly US$1 trillion to the Southeast Asian economy by 2030.
“AI technology has been rapidly and widely adopted by various industries to enhance and accelerate their business transformation,” said Phupa Akavipat, acting chief enterprise business officer of AIS. “Providing [an] AI with Cloud ‘GPU as-a-Service’ model will enable them to embrace the technology efficiently and scalably.”
Maxis CEO Goh Seow Eng added that the GPUaaS offering would also give enterprises a cost-efficient way to access high-performance computing and data processing capabilities. “They will also have the flexibility to scale their resources on-demand for more complex workloads such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D modelling and large-scale analytics.”
Wong Soon Nam, director of planning and transformation at Telkomsel, said that providing a “one-stop platform” across multiple markets gives businesses the flexibility to harness AI and 5G for a wide range of use cases, “whether it’s optimising operations with route planning, enhancing customer experience through product recommendations, strengthening security with fraud detection, or improving decision-making through advanced video analytics – all without the need for upfront investments.”