January 31, 2024 - Singtel today announced the launch of its Nxera data centre brand, alongside a commitment to advance AI deployment in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
While much ado will be made of its partnership with Nvidia to provide GPU clusters hosted across its data centre platform, the launch of the new brand goes beyond AI.
The MoU with Nvidia was supplemented with further agreements on securing renewable energy for its data centres, improving power and water efficiency, and creating a regional data centre academy to ensure a pipeline of talent is funnelled into the new business.
It also provides a vehicle for Singtel to continue its expansion outside of Singapore, the traditional data centre hub for Southeast Asia.
As land and power are getting scarcer and more expensive in Singapore, other countries across the region are seeing huge growth in digital services such as online banking.
This is leading the likes of Thailand, Vietnam, The Philippines, and Malaysia to consider more stringent data sovereignty regulations. Coupled with the boom in demand and the need to move data closer to end users, secondary markets across APAC are becoming increasingly attractive to data centre operators, hyperscalers and service providers.
Nxera CEO Bill Chang revealed the company has ambitions to increase its IT compute capacity by 200MW across Southeast Asia by 2025.
As of today, Singtel owns 7 operational data centres, located across Singapore and Hong Kong. It began construction of a new facility in Thailand in early 2023 in partnership with AIS, a local operator in which it holds a majority stake.
Singtel has also expanded its data centre platform to Indonesia, partnering with Telkom Indonesia. Both these data centres are expected to begin operations by 2025.
Becoming an Nvidia cloud partner means that enterprises can rent GPUs from Singtel, and deploy AI workloads without the upfront cost of the expensive hardware.
Furthermore, the MoUs it has signed with Gulf Energy, Medco Power, Sembcorp and TNB Renewables will help reduce the environmental impact of the more intense workloads the data centres will provide.
Finally, Singtel has partnered with five institutes of higher learning to train more than 150 students annually for its data centre business and ecosystem partners, addressing the talent crisis being experienced across the data centre industry.
