Red Hat announced on October 22 that it has opened its APAC AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore, with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB).
What the centre does
The centre is meant to help organizations in the region move AI projects from experiments into production on Red Hat’s open source platforms. Red Hat says its engineering teams will work along two paths: building reusable software architectures for problems that keep coming up across customers, and contributing code to upstream open source projects to cover enterprise needs in deployment, runtime optimization and platform management. The team includes engineers, forward-deployed engineers who work directly with customers, architects and project managers, and it will also run skills programs in automation, cloud-native development and DevSecOps.
Daniel Aw, Red Hat’s vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific, told The Edge Singapore the centre will start with about 18 people and work with Red Hat engineering teams in India, the U.S. and Europe. Singapore already hosts Red Hat’s Asia Pacific headquarters.
The DSTA agreement
At the launch, Red Hat signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA). The two will co-develop AI, cloud computing, application modernization and edge computing solutions, including DevSecOps and Day 2 operations practices for running AI and cloud systems at scale on premises and in the cloud. DSTA’s Akash Philip said the agency wants to build security checks into how it tests AI models before putting them on its networks.
Why it matters
It’s another sign of Red Hat pitching its stack, from RHEL to OpenShift AI, as the place enterprises run AI in production on their own infrastructure. It follows this week’s Red Hat and NVIDIA announcements at GTC Berlin.
Sources: Singapore EDB, Red Hat press release and The Edge Singapore.