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Ministry of Digital Development and Information
Speeches

Speech by SMS Tan Kiat How at Launch of Singtel Digital InfraCo – NVIDIA Centre of Excellence for Applied AI

24 February 2026

Mr Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Digital InfraCo,

Mr Marc Hamilton, Vice President, Solutions Architecture and Engineering, NVIDIA,

Distinguished guests, friends and colleagues,

  1. Good morning. I’m very happy to join all of you today for the launch of the Singtel–NVIDIA Centre of Excellence for Applied AI (COE AAI).

  2. Bill, Marc – Congratulations to both your teams for bringing this Centre to life. This is an important partnership, and I am glad to be here to mark its launch.

  3. At Budget 2026, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong set out the Government’s ambition for Singapore to harness AI as a strategic advantage.

    1. As PM put it, Singapore’s advantage does not lie in building the largest frontier models – it lies in deploying AI effectively, responsibly, and at speed.

  4. We are focused on how AI can be harnessed to solve real world problems and create value for our businesses and people.

  5. An important part of this effort is to foster an ecosystem of innovators and engineers who can develop and deploy AI solutions across our economy.

    1. Since we launched the refreshed National AI Strategy in end-2023, more than 60 AI Centres of Excellence (COEs) have been set up across Singapore.

      1. Some of these are sectoral COEs that bring together research institutions, industry, and government to develop AI solutions for common challenges across the entire industry value chain. An example is the Sectoral AI COE for Manufacturing, which is working on predictive maintenance and quality assurance for the sector.

      2. Others are company COEs, where individual businesses are building up their internal AI capabilities to improve their work processes, delivering better services to customers.

  6. The SIT x NVIDIA AI Centre (SNAIC) is a welcome addition to the ecosystem. The Centre helps businesses – large and small, to testbed, develop, and implement AI solutions.

    1. To date, the SNAIC has supported 70 companies to deploy 50 AI solutions with real business impact across industry sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and transport.

      1. For example, SNAIC worked with Tan Tock Seng Hospital to develop collaborative AI tools that support clinicians in delivering faster and more accurate care.

      2. One such tool is the Automated Visual Acuity Detection that uses AI-driven speech recognition and posture monitoring to automate eye tests – this in comparison to more traditional methods that require significant clinician involvement.

      3. These AI tools have reduced clinicians’ workload, reduced patient waiting times, enabled faster eyesight testing, and provided better support for patients in their recovery journey.

  7. The reality is that the development and deployment of such AI-powered digital solutions in the real world cannot be done by AI. We need model makers, engineers, developers, data scientists and many more roles to run advanced computing platforms, contribute to applied AI research and development, and build solutions.

  8. Singapore is committed to nurture a deep pool of tech and AI talent as part of our national AI push. MDDI will share further plans at the coming Budget/COS debates in Parliament.

  9. I am glad that Singtel and NVIDIA are strong supporters of this effort.

    1. The SNAIC AI Programme, supported under IMDA’s TechSkills Accelerator initiative, will provide fresh graduates and mid-career professionals with two months of intensive upskilling based on NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute curriculum. They will also gain practical skills from four months of hands-on industry projects.

    2. We are also expanding the pool of AI practitioners through the AI Apprenticeship Programme under AI Singapore and collaborations with leading technology companies such as Singtel. After the programme, these practitioners take on roles such as AI and machine learning engineers in companies across the ecosystem. Many of them eventually join these companies on a full-time basis after their apprenticeship.

  10. Another critical enabling element is the digital infrastructure on which these platforms and solutions are built and run on. This morning, let me touch on two of them – data centres, or DCs, and cloud services platforms.

  11. Singapore is a regional data centre hub with one of the highest concentrations of DCs in the region.

  12. These data centres are foundational to our digital economy.

    1. They house the compute capacity that supports Singapore’s AI ambitions.

    2. But they are also intensive users of resources, especially power and water.

  13. Today, Singapore already hosts more than 1.4 gigawatts of DC capacity, and we can only expect the demand for DCs to grow with the increased use of AI.

  14. It is therefore crucial for Singapore, a compact city-state with natural resource constraints, to ensure that this growth is sustainable.

  15. IMDA launched the Green Data Centre Roadmap in May 2024 to chart a sustainable growth pathway and turn Singapore’s resource constraints into opportunity.

    1. We are helping data centres tap on green energy sources for growth and take concrete steps to improve their energy efficiency.

    2. To support industry in this shift, we launched the Energy Efficiency Grant for the DC sector to help operators and users refresh their IT equipment to more energy-efficient models.

    3. We also released the IT Energy Efficiency standard in Jun 2025 to guide DC operators and users on selecting energy-efficient IT equipment, and operating IT equipment more efficiently.

  16. Later this year, MDDI will table the Digital Infrastructure Act (DIA) in parliament.

    1. The proposed new legislation seeks to establish baseline energy efficiency requirements for all data centres – existing and new ones that will be built. We will start by imposing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) requirements on data centres.

    2. MDDI and IMDA have been consulting industry stakeholders to ensure that the proposed requirements – while ambitious – are practicable and consistent with international benchmarks.

    3. We want to the DCs in Singapore to be more energy efficient and sustainable – not just for new DCs built in the coming years, but also existing DCs as they refresh their technologies and IT equipment over time to meet the DIA requirements.

    4. By systematically raising the energy efficiency and sustainability of all our DCs, we can create more headroom to support the growing demands of Singapore’s digital economy, particularly with the push for AI adoption.

  17. Beyond sustainability, the DIA will also establish requirements to enhance the resilience and security of major cloud service providers (CSPs) and the data centres.

    1. Data Centres and cloud services platforms enable digital services, operations, and transactions across many essential day-to-day functions such as e-banking and payments, ride-hailing, e-commerce, and digital identity authentication.

    2. There will be significant impact to our economy and people’s daily activities should disruptions or cyber-attacks to the digital infrastructure occur.

    3. While it is not realistic to eliminate these risks, like all digital systems, such disruptions may happen from time to time, due to different reasons.

    4. But at the same time, it is irresponsible for the Government to take a hands-off approach and leave it entirely to commercial arrangements between the CSPs, data centre operators and their enterprise customers, when there are spillover implications to the broader economy, society, national security and Singapore’s international reputation.

  18. The DIA will therefore require major CSPs and data centres to implement measures to manage security risks, minimise disruptions, and ensure business continuity.

    1. These include ex-ante requirements based on the Advisory Guidelines for Data Centres and Cloud Providers released last year, as well as ex-post incident reporting requirements.

  19. We will share more information when ready.

  20. The DIA will be a major step to ensure that Singapore’s digital infrastructure is sustainable, resilient and cybersecure, and importantly able to meet future demands.

  21. I would like to thank the many stakeholders and partners that have contributed your views to the DIA, and I seek your continued support for this important legislation when we introduce it later this year.

  22. I would end my remarks this morning by posing a question and sending out an invitation to all of you.

  23. The question is: “How does the digital infrastructure look like in the future AI-pervasive world?”.

  24. Singapore has consistently invested in our digital connectivity infrastructure to ensure it is future ready and a source of strategic competitive advantage for our enterprises.

    1. 30 years ago, we launched the Singapore ONE project which put in place a fully IP core across our telecommunication infrastructure. This brought Singapore online.

    2. 15 years ago, we took a major step to implement the Next Generation National Broadband Network which pulled fibre optic cables to all homes and businesses, becoming the first country to provide up to 1Gbps connection nationwide. This brought Singapore into the broadband world.

    3. Five years ago, we deployed mobile 5G Standalone (SA) Networks, becoming one of the first countries to have nationwide SA coverage. This brought Singapore into a mobile-first digital world.

  25. Looking into the next five to 10 years, AI-powered services and systems will be deeply interwoven into our daily lives and activities, from robots in workplaces and homes, to agents carrying out tasks and supporting our decisions, to many more innovations that we have yet to imagine.

  26. But what is clear is that our digital infrastructure must evolve and refresh to keep pace with this wave of AI innovation. It must continue to be future-ready, resilient, secure and responsive to new demands.

  27. While we don’t have a crystal ball in Singapore, we want to be among the first to grasp the contours of this future and be able to work with partners to enable this future here.

  28. In this regard, I am glad that the COE AAI will be tapping on Singtel’s infrastructure, especially its edge networks to accelerate development in this space.

  29. Environments like the Punggol Digital District (PDD) can serve as testbeds for companies to test and refine their AI applications at scale.

    1. Companies are experimenting and testing technologies such as embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous systems in a real, operational environment.

    2. To support this, IMDA is partnering with SIT and JTC to create a precinct scale robotics testbed that enables industry partners to co-develop, pilot, commercialise, and scale real world robotics solutions.

    3. Another example is Panasonic that launched its flagship Innovation Hub at PDD last year. It is piloting an AI-driven Human-Robot-Facility automation system for smart building and robotics applications.

    4. And NTUC FairPrice Group opened the world’s first generative AI-powered supermarket.

  30. I invite industry stakeholders, technology partners to join us in discovering and shaping the future digital infrastructure.

  31. In closing, let me once again extend my heartiest congratulations to Singtel and NVIDIA.

  32. I look forward to seeing the Centre’s impact and growth in the years ahead.

  33. Thank you very much.