- Singtel is leveraging liquid-cooled data centers to gain an edge in Singapore’s crowded cloud market
- It is looking to expand Paragon in other non-APAC regions, including Europe and the Middle East
- Singtel plans to focus on Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand for its data center business
Singtel Digital Infraco, the digital infrastructure arm of Singapore’s largest telecom service provider, is betting on liquid cool technology to stand out in the highly competitive artificial intelligence (AI) cloud segment in the country.
“We have strengthened our liquid-cooled capacity and we have launched the NVIDIA GB200 GPU based on that," Singtel Digital Infraco CTO Manoj Prasanna Kumar told Fierce in an exclusive interview. "We don't anticipate other players launching GB200 primarily because of the need to have a liquid-cooled facility. But next year, the situation might change."
As Fierce has noted before, high-power GPUs like the GB200 require liquid-cooling because they generate a lot of heat. But Kumar explained that "since there were not too many liquid-cooled data centers in Singapore, we strategically decided to build our own GPU cloud."
Singtel launched RE:AI (short for Reimagine AI), an AI‑cloud service that provides organizations access to GPU-powered infrastructure, AI workspaces and orchestration tools, last year to provide affordable access to AI technologies to enterprises.
By focusing on liquid-cooled data centers, Singtel has gained a crucial early-mover advantage in Singapore’s hypercompetitive cloud market. Most hyperscalers, including Google, AWS and Microsoft, are present in the country.
Singtel is also trying to get ahead of supply chain constraints as demand for AI tech ramps up. “NVIDIA has a very short supply chain, so we have to be early in the queue to get the first access to their new products," said Kumar.
Though others may catch up as the liquid cooling wave crests, Singtel believes that it will still be able to retain its competitive edge, thanks in part to the ecosystem of AI partners it is building and its experience operating running critical liquid-cooled facilities.
“Being one of the largest ISPs [Internet Service Provider] is a key differentiator for us. We can also do encrypted quantum networks and so on. The other thing is that our experience of running liquid-cooled facilities is crucial to meet the demanding SLAs of the customers. Apart from that, our experience of operating hyperscaler-grade data centers for over a decade has prepared us for meeting the SLAs to the customer end-to-end, not just GPU operation, but also in the data center facility,” Kumar said.
And on the partner front, it's ecosystem is hosted locally in its own sovereign cloud. This, Kumar believes, is another key differentiator for them as it will provide “end-to-end security of everything stored, processed and offered as-a-service inside the country.”
Apart from Singtel, several other service providers, including SK Telecom and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), have launched AI clouds to boost their revenues.
A Paragon of orchestration
Besides RE:AI, Singtel Digital Infraco is also looking to aggressively grow its Paragon platform, a unified orchestration platform that enables organizations to manage networks, edge compute and AI infrastructure while integrating with multiple public clouds. Launched in 2022, Paragon has been deployed by several telcos, including AIS in Thailand, MasOrange in Spain and Maxis in Malaysia, among others.
Through Paragon, Singtel sees itself "helping other telcos who want to become AI Cloud operators, like us, and also helping them with the software service.” In addition to orchestration, it's also working to build API aggregation capabilities into Paragon. It recently announced a partnership with Bridge Alliance, a group of 34 service providers, where Paragon has been adopted as the API aggregation platform.
The company is looking to grow Paragon’s presence in markets beyond Asia Pacific. Already, it is in discussions with service providers in Europe and the Middle East.
“Some markets are taking a staged approach in 5G rollouts. Typically, we work with carriers who already have a 5G NSA [Non-Standalone] or 5G SA [Standalone] network, so they can get the best value by monetizing the edge, network orchestration and so on,” said Kumar.
Data center growth
Singtel Digital Infraco is also in the midst of expanding its data center business, Nxera. It has around 10 data centers in Singapore and it is building a new one in the country. It also has upcoming projects in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, the focus markets for the company.
There have been reports of global tech majors, like Microsoft, backing off from data center projects as they reevaluate the demand from AI and cloud. This is not the case for Singtel.
“There is no change in our strategy. We see a continuously growing demand for AI-ready data centers,” Kumar concluded.