Singtel noted that Asian telcos AIS, Maxis and Telkomsel are among the alliance’s members who already signaled their interest in the service
Bridge Alliance, which is a group of 35 mobile operators, and Singaporean telco Singtel announced a strategic partnership with the aim of bringing Singtel’s GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offerings to enterprises across the region.
Southeast Asian telcos AIS, Maxis and Telkomsel are among the alliance’s members who already signaled their interest in the service.
This agreement follows Singtel’s announcement in February on the launch of its GPUaaS later this year, which will provide enterprises with access to NVIDIA’s AI computing power so they can deploy AI at scale quickly and cost effectively to accelerate growth and innovation.
As part of the agreement, Bridge Alliance member operators will get access to the GPUaaS offerings from Singtel. As the GPU needs expand in these countries, more GPU clusters will be launched into the respective countries to accelerate and scale the businesses. Bridge Alliance says it will assist its members in fast-tracking their go-to-market strategies and effectively drive the success of the GPUaaS offerings with the enterprises.
Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo unit, said:“Our collaboration with Bridge Alliance and telcos in the region will help democratize 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. This reinforces our goal of being a catalyst for innovation and supporting the digital transformation of Southeast Asia’s digital economies.”
Through its Paragon platform, Singtel claimed to be the first telco to bring AI to the 5G edge in the 5G@Sentosa trials for Singapore government agencies. Paragon is Singtel’s all-in-one orchestration platform for telco networks. Paragon orchestrated a multi-edge compute and NVIDIA GPU environment while enabling customers to deploy 5G use cases at speed and at scale. “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 businesses,” Chang added.
Bridge Alliance and Singtel had recently announced a strategic partnership to accelerate regional Application Programming Interface (API) federation with a telco API exchange enabled by Singtel’s Paragon platform.
Bridge Alliance said it is launching the Bridge Alliance API Exchange (BAEx), which leverages Paragon to aggregate its member operators’ network authentication, user verification and network quality APIs. With BAEx, Singtel said that enterprises and developers can streamline the deployment of new services on member operator networks by accessing a common API framework, which provides secure, consistent and on-demand access to telco network capabilities across multiple regions.
Singel also noted that BAEx will significantly reduce complexity and friction for enterprise customers, developers and solution providers through its unified integration, simplified commercial framework and common operational support model. The APIs offered will support regional and global enterprise use cases in fintech, e-commerce and over-the-top providers starting with network authentication, user verification and location tracking functions.
