Singaporean telco Singtel has formed a strategic partnership with AI cloud provider Nscale to accelerate GPU capacity across Europe and Southeast Asia.
The offering, which the two companies have dubbed GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), will see Nscale receive access to Singtel’s Nvidia H100 GPU capacity in Southeast Asia through the telco’s orchestration platform, Paragon.
Furthermore, Singtel’s regional data center business Nxera will provide data center capacity to support the large-scale deployment of Nscale GPU capacity as it expands in the region.
In return, Singtel will be able to use the AMD and Nvidia accelerators owned by Nscale in Europe to support customer workloads on the continent.
In a statement, the two companies said the partnership will allow their customers to benefit from the “flexibility of a wider geographic footprint and robust infrastructure support,” and “drive greater utilization” of their respective GPU clusters.
“As we continue to augment our GPUaaS offerings, we are forging a series of strategic partnerships to grow our ecosystem and broaden our service availability for our customers,” said Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo and Nxera. “Our partnership with Nscale will allow our customers to tap into their high-performance GPU resources on demand, unlocking new possibilities for innovation and efficiency.”
Josh Payne, Nscale founder and CEO, added: “Through this strategic partnership, Nscale will provide Singtel customers with unmatched access to sustainable, high-performance, and cost-effective AI compute to accelerate enterprise generative AI in the region and beyond.”
Singtel first revealed plans for a GPU-as-a-Service offering in February 2024. At the time, the company said that at launch, Singtel’s GPUaaS will be powered by Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU-powered clusters that are operated in existing upgraded data centers in Singapore.
In August, Singtel announced it was partnering with the Bridge Alliance to launch a GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering in Southeast Asia that mimics the deal struck with Nscale.
The telco partnered with Nvidia in January 2024 to bring artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to an undisclosed number of its Nxera data centers.
The first cluster will be based in Singapore. Singtel broke ground on its latest Singaporean facility, known as DC Tuas, in August 2023. Set to go online in 2025, the eight-story building is set to offer 58MW of IT load capacity across 120,000 sq ft, making it one of the largest in the country. The data center is set to be integrated with the telco’s existing cable landing station (CLS).
Nscale officially launched in May 2024 after being spun out of cryptomining firm Arkon Energy. The company offers a GPU cloud based on AMD hardware, specifically AMD's Instinct M1300X accelerators as well as AMD MI250 GPUs and Nvidia’s A100, H100, and V100 GPUs.
Nscale operates a 60MW data center in Glomfjord, Norway, that was previously owned by Arkon, and claims to have a pipeline of over 500MW of greenfield data centers across the US.
