Singapore-based data centre provider STT GDC and AI technology stack vendor SuperX have created an AI innovation centre that lets businesses test out their AI efforts on the latest hardware before scaling them up.
Located at an existing data centre at Tai Seng in the northeast of Singapore, it comes with Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that are commonly used to develop and run large language models (LLMs).
The innovation centre supports air-cooled servers for now, though it is possible to connect more high-performance liquid-cooled servers separately, if required.
The free trial is available for two weeks but may be extended an additional week on request, according to the two companies at the centre’s launch yesterday.
It also promises to be easy to “plug in”, with businesses quickly running their workloads on virtual machine environments and tapping on the Nvidia GPUs. From here, they can figure if their AI experiment is worth scaling up.
Unlike other similar data centre offerings, the new testbed will allow businesses to test out their AI experiments in a “non-commercial” manner, said Chris Street, the group chief revenue officer at STT GDC.
This would help them prove the return on investment (ROI) to their board of directors and other stakeholders to greenlight larger-scale AI efforts, he added.
Already, an institute of higher learning has become among the first customers to come onboard, said Kenny Sng, the chief technology officer of SuperX.
Without disclosing the organisation, he said the arrangement was to run a biochemistry workload, which required the GPUs that the new innovation centre provided, he told reporters.
The centre’s opening is timely, its developers believe, because a majority of Asian businesses are still stuck in the AI pilot stage and unable to scale up the efforts without the skills and infrastructure needed for the next leap forward.
While 90 per cent of organisations in the region have started on their AI journeys, a large 71 per cent are stuck in a “builder” stage where they struggle to scale up and deliver consistent ROI, according to an STT GDC study released yesterday as well.
Only 17 per cent of organisations in the region are already “future ready”, with scalable infrastructure, mature data governance and specialised operational expertise.
The numbers are slightly better for Singapore, an AI leader. Yet, while 95 per cent of organisations here are on their AI journey, a good 52 per cent are still in the building stage, unable to scale from pilots to production.
With the war in the Middle East bringing new concern with data centres in the crosshairs, there has been increased urgency to distribute workloads, said Street.
Like the move towards the cloud a decade ago, businesses are shifting to outsource their AI efforts, especially to data centres that provide GPUs as a service, he added.
