Singtel does the 'we’re building datacenters to host Nvidia clusters’ thing

Renames its bit barn business as ‘Nxera’ as it plans three new facilities, some built just for AI

Telcoms giant Singtel announced Thursday a collaboration with Nvidia to deliver purpose-built AI infrastructure across Southeast Asia.

According to Singtel, it will upgrade its datacenter fleet to host Nvidia GPU clusters, and later create purpose-built AI facilities.

To do this, Singtel launched a new datacenter brand on Wednesday it's calling Nxera (and which is pronounced nex-zeh-ra) that will operate the seven datacenters in the company’s current fleet.

Singtel is in the process of developing three AI datacenters: a 58MW barn in the Tuas area of Singapore slated for operation in early 2026, another in Indonesia, and a third in Thailand.

"These new datacenters will be standardized for customers across countries to give those with multi-country operations a consistent experience and greater speed to market," promised the telco, which then indicated it plans to expand its Asia Pacific footprint.

Singtel signed four MOUs related to the datacenters. Besides an MOU with Nvidia on AI development, there was one to grow renewable energy partnerships, another to create a testbed for sustainable tech, and a fourth for driving the talent pipeline.

As part of the testbed solutions, Nxera will establish a test liquid and immersion cooling platform for implementation at the Singapore Tuas datacenter, and at other unspecified datacenters. The telco vowed that the Tuas datacenter would have one of the lowest power usage effectiveness ratings in Asia – 1.23 at full load.

A local firm, Red Dot Analytics, will develop a smart IoT and digital twin platform to monitor the datacenter. CEO Henry Xu said the partnership planned to "to tackle the unique challenges brought by extremely high rack power density and air-liquid hybrid cooling."

According to Soh Wai Wah, CEO of Singapore Polytechnic – which is a partner in the talent pipeline MOU – Singapore has approximately 70 datacenters which consume seven percent of the country's total electricity.

According to the United States International Trade Administration, 60 percent of the APAC region's datacenters are in Singapore. US players include Digital Realty, Equinix, Savvis, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Verizon.

Hot and humid, the island nation took it upon itself to release a standard for operating datacenters in tropical conditions last June.

However, that didn't stop one overheating datacenter from disrupting 2.5 million bank transactions in November.

With AI driving increased datacenter usage, the need for more datacenters – as well as innovative thermal management – will only grow. ®