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 Digital 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.
The chip maker has opened numerous AI research labs across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
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.
Singtel hopes to build an “AI grid,” including a network of “liquid-cooled, scalable, hyper-connected, AI-ready data centers,” said Manoj Prasanna Kumar, vice-president and CTO of Singtel Digital Infraco.
Update, Feb. 24, 2026: This article has been updated to include additional detail on Singtel’s business.
