Singtel’s RE:AI, Mistral AI team up for sovereign pitch

• Singtel is pushing sovereign digital services in the island state
• Its sovereign AI cloud unit, RE:AI, has teamed up with French AI developer Mistral AI 
• The partners will develop sovereign AI services for multiple industry verticals in multiple markets

The sovereign AI cloud unit of Singtel Digital InfraCo, dubbed RE:AI, has teamed up with French AI developer Mistral AI to co-develop AI solutions focused on multiple industry verticals for multiple markets in south-east Asia and to establish an associated Applied AI Centre of Excellence, the companies have announced. 

With Mistral AI, RE:AI is focusing on the development of services that are based on a combination of the RE:AI sovereign AI cloud GPU platform and the French company’s open source software stack (including AI training capabilities, foundation models, scalable platforms, agentic workflows and developer productivity tools) to “enable secure, multi-tenant GPU-as-a-Service and AI-as-a-Service designed for essential industries and public sector deployments”.

The aim is to develop services that will meet the sovereign needs of companies in financial services, defence, government shared services and healthcare, which will be able to access the services from datacentre facilities in Singapore, Johor in Malaysia and Batam in Indonesia that are operated by Singtel’s datacentre operation, Nxera. Those datacentre facilities “are interconnected by the group’s subsea cable links to form a resilient grid to power AI workloads locally and regionally,” noted Singtel.

The service portfolio will comprise some that can be applied across multiple industries (aka ‘horizontal’ services) as some developed for specific verticals that can enable “sector-specific automation” and “analytics use cases”.

To help “accelerate adoption” of the services, the partners are to set up an Applied AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) that will serve as a “joint engineering hub” and which will aim to “drive rapid prototyping, testing and deployment of AI solutions that address sector-specific challenges and strengthen operational resilience”. 

The facility will bring together teams from Singtel, Mistral AI and ecosystem partners “to co-create secure and compliant AI environments within Singtel’s infrastructure, integrating solutions such as Mistral AI Studio, Mistral Code and other applications,” noted Singtel.

Singtel Singapore will be the CoE’s pilot customer, “trialling use cases including customer care AI chatbots, network operations copilots, and AI-assisted network tender evaluation application,” the operator added. 

Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel's Digital InfraCo, stated: “As sovereign AI initiatives accelerate across the public and private sectors in the region, our digital infrastructure and AI cloud provide the secure, scalable environment needed to drive adoption and unlock greater innovation. Collaborating with AI leaders like Mistral AI furthers our mission to make AI easily accessible, giving our customers flexibility and choice while meeting their data governance and security requirements. Enhancing our sovereign AI capabilities will also reinforce Singapore’s position as a trusted hub for digital growth and AI innovation.”

Mistral AI’s CEO Arthur Mensch added that RE: AI is “an ideal ally to drive scalable AI adoption. Together, we will empower enterprises to deploy high-performance, secure AI solutions, accelerating Singapore’s vision as a global AI hub while delivering tangible ROI for industries.”

News of the partnership follows only weeks after RE:AI teamed up with Santa Clara, California-based data security specialist Cohesity for the development of what SIngtel describes as a “sovereign AI data security and management service”. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV