Singtel pitches affordable AI from the cloud

The Singapore incumbent has just launched RE:AI, its new cloud-based offering that it claims will democratise access to advanced artificial intelligence.

Pitched at enterprises and public sector customers, it brings together high performance compute and storage infrastructure; AI workspaces and tools; and high-speed networking – including fixed, 5G, and even quantum-safe networks. They are packaged up and delivered through Paragon – Singtel's orchestration platform.

If it works as intended, RE:AI will deliver to clients all the benefits of building and deploying AI applications without the hefty overheads of maintaining complex infrastructure. Those are incurred by Singtel, which presumably will recoup these costs through subscription fees.

"Many enterprises and public sector customers have shown keen interest to bring AI into their operations. However, the high costs and long lead times for GPUs, the need for special environments to host them due to their intense energy utilisation, the complexity of AI technology and the lack of talent are key friction points in their respective journeys," said Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Digital InfraCo.

"With the launch of RE:AI, we're significantly reducing entry barriers, making AI easily accessible to enterprises, government agencies, research communities and academia – the more people have access to AI, the more innovation is bound to emerge, which in turn fuels growth," he said.

Digital InfraCo was carved out of Singtel in April 2023. It houses the telco's regional data centre, subsea cable, and satellite operations, as well the aforementioned 5G, multi-access edge compute (MEC) and cloud orchestration platform, Paragon.

In January, Digital InfraCo partnered with Nvidia to equip its data centres – which operate under the Nxera brand – with the chip maker's graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI reference architecture. The partnership covers not just Singapore but also extends Indonesia and Thailand.

Cloud-based access to Nvidia-powered data centres only goes so far though.

In line with Singtel's bid to democratise AI and support the Singapore government's National AI Strategy 2.0, RE:AI has signed no fewer than five memoranda of understanding (MoUs) that promise to foster the development of the AI ecosystem.

First up, Singtel has pledged to work with the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore with a view to making a diverse range of high-performance computing technologies available to the research community. It will also develop an AI R&D platform and marketplace, comprising AI tools, data products and applications. Researchers can also use it as a repository to share their models, which will be accessible to government and private sector users.

MoU number two will see RE:AI collaborate with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), the Singapore Manufacturing Federation (SMF), and the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) to support AI-related research and innovation that has the potential to create new solutions for the advanced manufacturing sector.

To spur commercial AI application development, RE:AI has agreed an MoU with AI app and platform developers AlphaSense, H2O.AI, Hippocratic.AI and Hive AI to launch AI software, applications, tools and models for customers – all powered by RE:AI, and orchestrated through Paragon, of course.

In a bid to uncover potential AI unicorns, RE:AI has also signed an MoU with Digital Industry Singapore to launch an AI accelerator programme, that will identify, incubate and scale promising AI companies, with the aim of convincing start-ups to settle in Singapore.

Finally, MoU number five will see Singtel work with AI Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and the National University of Singapore to co-develop training programmes that will provide valuable AI skills to the operator's workforce. More than 10,000 staff are expected to benefit from the combination of online modules and practical workshops.

If five MoUs wasn't quite enough, Singtel also pointed out that last week Digital InfraCo signed another one, this time with decarbonisation solution specialist GoNetZero. Under the agreement, the latter's various sustainability solutions – which cover renewable energy certificates and carbon credits, among others – will be made available to RE:AI clients.

"RE:AI will foster a dynamic ecosystem of partners with distinctive capabilities and platforms to accelerate AI adoption to drive innovation and growth in Singapore and the region, sustainably," Chang said. "As we build on this ecosystem, we will attract global AI tech companies here to expand into the region with our market access. This is key to positioning Singapore as a regional AI."

For Singtel, all that needs to happen now is for AI to actually live up to the hype.