Singtel and SK Telecom prepare GPU-as-a-Service offerings, expanding telecom carriers into AI infrastructure services.

Singtel and SK Telecom have both recently announced partnerships to establish GPU-as-a-service offerings wherein GPU clusters operated by the companies are made available for third-party AI workloads. Singtel has been particularly active, announcing deals with Bridge Alliance on August 19, Hitachi on August 26, Nscale on August 29, and GMI Cloud on September 3. These announcements 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, a consortium of 35 operators, 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. Singtel has leveraged 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. Singtel Digital InfraCo CEO Bill Chang stated that "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" regarding Bridge Alliance members.

In June, Singtel and Hitachi announced a collaboration to integrate Paragon with Hitachi's AI applications for manufacturing and other enterprise customers. The two firms are now working under a memorandum of understanding "to sustainably enhance data center performance and capabilities, thereby accelerating AI adoption and digital transformation of enterprises." With Nscale, an AI cloud platform provider, Singtel is expanding GPU capacity in Europe. Nscale operates both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in its footprint, allowing Singtel customers to access Nscale infrastructure in Europe while Nscale customers gain access to Singtel's NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU clusters in Southeast Asia, with Paragon again used for orchestration.

Singtel and GMI Cloud have also partnered to 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." SKT VP and Head of the Enterprise Business Division Kim Kyeong-deog stated that "A strategic partnership with Lambda will strengthen our competitiveness in AI cloud services and develop greater business opportunities in Korea."