Singapore’s Singtel partners with Nvidia to build a research lab for companies that care about data sovereignty

Singtel, Singapore’s largest telecoms company, is continuing its push to become more than just a mobile network provider with a new “center of excellence,” established with U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

Targeted for launch in June, the center will help firms who care about data sovereignty, such as banks, hospitals and government enterprises. These organizations may prefer to process this data locally, rather than housing it in servers based outside the country.

“AI is becoming more embedded in decision-making, and government entities and enterprises… need assurance that their data is protected,” Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Infraco, the firm’s business unit which manages its data centers, said during a press briefing on Feb. 24.

The new research center will help design future data centers with power densities between 600 kW and 1 MW—up to 100 times more than the average data center—and assemble an ecosystem of model makers and app developers to assist businesses in scaling their AI use.

Nvidia said its Singtel partnership was part of a drive to deepen its presence in global AI research. “Chips are just the second layer of the cake, the third layer that you need is AI infrastructure,” said Marc Hamilton, Nvidia’s vice-president of solutions architecture and engineering, at the center’s launch in Singapore.

The chip maker has opened numerous AI research labs across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Re-inventing a telco giant

Singtel, No. 27 on the Southeast Asia 500, is Singapore’s oldest telco, founded in 1879 as the Private Telephone Exchange. Today, it’s the city-state’s largest mobile network operator, with over 4 million subscribers as of March 2025. It also holds major stakes in foreign operators like Australia’s Optus and India’s Bharti Airtel.

Yet the company has been forced to reinvent itself, as competition from alternate platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and Zoom have driven down usage of traditional voice calls and SMS messaging. Singtel’s Singapore-based mobile service revenue fell by 10.1% year-on-year between April and December 2025, which the company blamed on “intense price competition”. (Overall revenue declined by 0.5% over the same period)

Thus, Singtel is leaning into its data center business, including work on a facility in neighboring Johor, Malaysia, which is slated to open in the second half of 2026. It also opened a new data center in Tuas in Singapore, and joined a consortium led by private equity firm KKR to acquire ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, a regional provider of data centers.

Singtel hopes to build an “AI grid,” or a network of “liquid-cooled, scalable, hyper-connected, AI-ready data centers,” said Manoj Prasanna Kumar, vice-president and CTO of Singtel Infraco.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com