Maybank Investment Bank said Monday that it sees Singapore’s largest mobile network operator a communications technology group Singtel as a long-term beneficiary of Physical AI in ASEAN, while its data centers, GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering and connectivity assets position it well to capture near-term growth from digital artificial intelligence (AI).
The research house said in a note that it recently spoke with members of Singtel’s Enterprise Products team to understand its perspective on the emerging Physical AI opportunity. While adoption remains early, Singtel sees Physical AI becoming an important enterprise growth driver within five years.
Singtel sees connectivity as cornerstone of Physical AI, but the enterprise opportunity extends beyond providing bandwidth.
In deployments such as NUHS’ robot nurse companions, Hyundai’s HMGICS smart manufacturing and ongoing AV trials, Singtel works with customers to combine differentiated 5G connectivity with orchestration, cybersecurity and managed services.
Its CUBΣ platform aims to simplify complex, multivendor environments by giving customers a unified view across networks, devices and applications.
The broader monetization opportunity therefore lies in solving operational pain points and supporting mission-critical outcomes, rather than selling connectivity as a stand-alone product.
While management views Physical AI as a niche adjacency over the next one to two years, it expects the opportunity to evolve into a meaningful enterprise growth engine over the medium term.
The key enabler is the emergence of mission-critical applications—such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare and smart manufacturing—that require low latency, high reliability and differentiated service levels.
Unlike consumer connectivity, these workloads already command premium pricing through capabilities such as 5G network slicing.
Management expects selected autonomous mobility use cases to commercialize ahead of broader robotics adoption and believes healthcare, transport and manufacturing will be the key verticals driving enterprise demand within five years.
It is noted that public commentary from T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T point to a clear and increasingly consistent industry narrative.
Operators acknowledge that today’s AI workloads—model training, large-scale inference and agentic automation — remain concentrated in data centers and wireline networks, with limited impact on mobile traffic today.
But they expect Physical AI to become the next inflection point, as autonomous vehicles, robots and other connected machines drive new, increasingly uplink-intensive traffic that requires low latency, high reliability and differentiated service levels.
Importantly, operators are investing ahead of this demand through 5G Advanced, AI-native network capabilities, edge inference and future spectrum acquisitions, viewing Physical AI as a new enterprise addressable market rather than simply another source of data consumption.
“Taken together, we believe these discussions reinforce our central thesis that communications networks could regain strategic relevance in the next phase of the AI investment cycle,” said Maybank.