Equinix and Cisco have expanded their collaboration to let organisations deploy Cisco’s Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA directly inside Equinix’s Singapore data centres, aiming to give enterprises a secure, sovereign foundation to scale AI projects.

The expanded partnership, announced on 17 June, brings a full-stack, validated AI architecture into Equinix‘s Singapore facilities, with Cisco Unified Edge extending AI infrastructure to retail stores, hospitals and warehouses. The companies said 83 per cent of Singaporean organisations plan to deploy AI agents, yet only 1 in 10 say their networks are fully flexible and capable of scaling instantly, according to the 2025 Cisco AI Readiness Index.

Tackling Asia-Pacific’s AI infrastructure gap

Equinix said organisations across Asia-Pacific are increasingly hitting limits in legacy infrastructure, latency, data sovereignty and fragmented systems as they try to scale AI. The end-to-end architecture is designed to let businesses run AI securely in private, high-performance environments, whether in the data centre or at the network edge, while maintaining zero-trust security and observability at every layer of the AI stack. By leveraging Equinix’s interconnected ecosystem of more than 2,000 technology companies, organisations can test configurations and connectivity requirements before committing to full deployment across data centres, cloud and edge locations.

“Singapore continues to place the digital economy at the heart of its national growth strategy… as AI becomes more embedded in business strategies, organisations need to connect to their ecosystems, make informed decisions, and scale with confidence,” said Yee May Leong, Managing Director, Singapore, Equinix.

Supporting Singapore’s national AI missions

The initiative is positioned to support Singapore’s National AI Missions by providing secure, edge-ready infrastructure for AI transformation across sectors such as finance and manufacturing. Bee Kheng Tay, President, ASEAN at Cisco, said organisations scaling their AI ambitions need a foundation that is simple, secure and scalable, and that the collaboration with Equinix is designed to let customers focus on driving business value rather than managing infrastructure complexity.

The announcement follows Equinix’s broader push into distributed AI infrastructure across the region, and comes as Singapore positions itself as a hub for sovereign AI deployment amid growing regional demand for data governance and compliance.

Singapore-based organisations in regulated sectors have increasingly cited data sovereignty as a barrier to AI adoption, with concerns over where data is processed and stored often slowing deployment. The Equinix-Cisco architecture is designed to let enterprises keep workloads within Singapore’s borders while still connecting to a broader ecosystem of cloud and AI service providers.