While SK Telecom focuses on its home market, Singtel has partnered on GPUaaS in APAC and Europe
Singtel and SK Telecom have both recently announced partnerships geared toward GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) offerings wherein GPU clusters operated by the companies are made available for third-party AI workloads.
Singtel is apparently casting a wide net, announcing deals with Bridge Alliance on Aug. 19, Hitachi on Aug. 26, Nscale on Aug. 29, and GMI Cloud on Sept. 3. These all follow a February announcement from Singtel that it joined the NVIDIA Partner Network Cloud Program which brings NVIDIA’s full-stack of hardware and software to Singtel’s Nxera data center business.
Bridge Alliance is a consortium of 35 operators who will make use of Singtel’s GPUaaS to bring accelerated computing for AI to markets across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. As adoption of the new service scales up, Singtel plans to deploy more GPU clusters.
Tying this to 5G, Singtel has used its proprietary Paragon orchestration platform to control “a multi-edge compute and NVIDIA GPU environment while enabling customers to deploy 5G use cases at speed and at scale,” according to the company. “With more telcos deploying 5G network services, we see this real-time AI offering powered by GPUaaS at 5G edge at low latencies as a key growth driver for their enterprise business,” Singtel Digital InfraCo CEO Bill Chang said in a statement regarding Bridge Alliance members.
In June this year Singtel and Hitachi announced a collaboration to integrate Paragon with Hitachi’s AI applications for manufacturing and other enterprise customers. In the latest, the two firms are working under a memorandum of understanding “to sustainably enhance data center performance and capabilities, thereby accelerating AI adoption and digital transformation of enterprises,” according to a press release.
With Nscale, an AI cloud platform provider, Singtel will expand GPU capacity in Europe. Nscale operates both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in its footprint. While Singtel customers will be able to access Nscale infrastructure in Europe, Nscale customers will have access to Singtel’s NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU clusters in Southeast Asia. Paragon will again be used for orchestration, according to Singtel.
And the latest, Singtel and GMI Cloud have partnered to, again, combine their GPU clusters and make them available as-a-service for enterprise AI applications. GMI Cloud CEO Alex Yeh said the collaboration is “creating an ecosystem that will accelerate AI adoption, enabling telecom providers and enterprises to enhance their services and drive innovation in the region.”
In South Korea, SK Telecom is working with GPU cloud firm Lambda “to establish a large-scale NVIDIA GPU cluster” to support cloud services, including GPUaaS “on an as-needed basis to develop or utilize AI services,” according to an announcement
.“A strategic partnership with Lambda will strengthen our competitiveness in AI cloud services and develop greater business opportunities in Korea,”SKT VP and Head of the Enterprise Business Division Kim Kyeong-deog said in a statement.
