• Singapore’s dominant telco has a sovereign cloud strategy that supports the government’s sovereign AI agenda
• And Singtel’s off to a good start with the development of a string of advanced datacentres across the region and a tech partnership with Nvidia
• Can it become a regional sovereign cloud heavyweight?

Telcos around the world have switched their strategic and investment focus to AI infrastructure and operators in Asia Pacific are no exception, with Singapore’s dominant telco, Singtel, among the leading pack of companies seeking to position themselves as AI lynchpins and providers of sovereign cloud services in the region. 

Singtel’s AI infrastructure strategy preceded the recent rush to support sovereign cloud services and its approach has been validated by recent events.

The arrival of DeepSeek’s slimmed-down Chinese generative AI (GenAI) chatbots – revealed in January this year – rocked the AI world by demonstrating that leaner and cheaper large language models (LLMs) were likely on the way, causing immediate excitement across Asia. 

The long-held desire of Asian governments to exercise firmer jurisdictional control of  AI infrastructures was boosted as it became clear that Deepseek’s success was loosening the long-term grip on GenAI by Silicon Valley’s large LLM leaders, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. 

Meanwhile, dogged advances in silicon technology by Huawei, AMD and others promise to chip away at Nvidia’s hegemony over the high-cost, high-performance processors necessary to train them.

That meant room was being created for new, much lower-cost models for GenAI,  opening enough financial headroom to develop infrastructures tailored to meet specific national requirements around the data sharing, security and local cultural and language support – all things required for a sovereign cloud (that is: a cloud computing environment designed to meet the specific data residency and regulatory requirements of a particular country or region).

Asian governments are very keen on this ‘sovereign cloud’ concept and they’re moving quickly to support it: Research firm IDC calculates that around a third of Asia Pacific governments are aiming to adopt such services by 2026, and they’ll be relying on the national and regional telcos to support their efforts.

One of the most enthusiastic sovereign cloud adopters in Asia is Singapore, with Singtel well placed to play a role. 

For its part, the Singapore government is chipping in $767m over the next five years  to fund AI training programmes, chip procurement and the establishment of AI centres of excellence. 

Singtel, meanwhile, is the major builder of sovereign cloud and enabling infrastructure in Singapore and has been working with Nvidia since early 2024, when it first announced its intention to launch a GPU-as-a-service offering, to ensure access to the necessary processing power and software while forging ahead with a string of advanced energy-efficient datacentres across South-east Asia, with the first to be constructed in Singapore followed by installations in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and even Japan. 

To support its plans, Singtel created a specific brand for its datacentre business, Nxera, in early 2024 and announced that its Digital InfraCo unit and Nvidia will “collaborate on opportunities to support Singapore’s updated National AI Strategy 2.0 to drive innovation and create new value through AI.” It added: “In becoming an Nvidia cloud partner in the region, Singtel will democratise AI access for enterprises, large and small, to Nvidia GPU clusters hosted in Nxera’s AI DC [datacentre] platform in the region. Customers can leverage Singtel’s extensive fixed broadband network, submarine cables and 5G high-speed network connectivity together with the patented Paragon cloud platform to orchestrate their AI workloads in a multinetwork and multicloud environment. Nxera will also provide customers with carrier neutrality to meet all their connectivity resiliency needs.”

As an Nvidia Cloud Partner, the telco says it will feature Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software and optimised services, and rely on Nvidia’s Hopper graphics processing units (GPUs). First introduced in 2022, these represent a significant step up in AI processing, claims Nvidia, delivering nine-times-faster AI model training and 30-times-faster inference.

Then in August last year Singtel forged a strategic partnership with the Bridge Alliance, an industry body representing 35 network operators worldwide, to bring the Singapore telco’s GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) offerings to enterprises across the region.

And in September 2024, Singtel further advanced its GPUaaS strategy by agreeing a partnership with GMI Cloud, a GPUaaS specialist that is already offering services from datacentres in Asia Pacific – see Singtel forges another GPUaaS partnership.

Then in October, Singtel unveiled its AI cloud platform, dubbed RE:AI, to help make AI technologies more readily accessible by industry verticals, enterprises, public sector organisations and academia without “having to worry about the overheads of complex infrastructure”.

Another important partner for Singtel’s sovereign cloud effort is Microsoft, whose CoPilot AI companion is being used internally to finesse employees’ workflows and with which it also collaborates to deliver sector-specific AI solutions and integrate Azure Public MEC (edge computing) with Singtel’s 5G network. 

In addition, Singtel works with ServiceNow as its workflow automation partner and Amazon Web Services to provide cloud-based AI and machine learning services.

Singtel wants to offer sovereign cloud services on a regional basis, not just for users in Singapore. This may prove a challenge since over time ‘issues’ are bound to surface as sovereign requirements will inevitably differ (perhaps markedly) across Asian national boundaries, particularly around the thorny issues of security and data privacy. This may limit any provider’s ability to manage a single regional cloud supporting multiple sovereigns, an approach that would provide the greatest scale and efficiencies. That aside, Singtel looks certain to be in a strong position to plant sovereign clouds in South-east Asia.  

– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV