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SINGTEL and Bridge Alliance – a mobile alliance with 35 member operators globally – announced a partnership on Monday (Aug 19) that will take the telco’s GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offerings to enterprises across South-east Asia once it is launched later this year.

GPUaaS is a cloud-based solution that offers access to graphics processing units (GPUs) on demand.

GPU is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) chip and its potential applications include machine learning, graphics rendering, data processing and gaming.

The deal will allow Bridge Alliance member operators to gain access to the GPUaaS offerings from Singtel.

As the need for GPUs expands in these countries, more such clusters will be launched in the respective countries to accelerate and scale the businesses.

Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo unit, said: “Our collaboration with Bridge Alliance and telcos in the region will help democratise and accelerate the use of AI by enterprises across all industries, giving them the tools to achieve greater productivity and business value with our next-generation digital infrastructure and solutions.” 

AIS in Thailand, Malaysia’s Maxis and Telkomsel in Indonesia are among the early adopters of the offering.

Goh Seow Eng, CEO of Maxis, said: “We look forward to being the first telco to bring GPUaaS to businesses here in Malaysia. This offering will provide a cost-efficient way for businesses 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.”

On Mar 19, the local telco said it would launch its GPUaaS in Singapore and South-east Asia in the third quarter of this year. It would provide companies with access through Nvidia H100 GPU-powered clusters that are operated in Singtel’s existing upgraded data centres in Singapore.