HTX’s artificial intelligence (AI) movement significantly boosted its ability to scale AI development for the Home Team when the agency unveiled its first enterprise-grade AI infrastructure on 26 Aug.
Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs Mr Edwin Tong officiated the launch of the new system, which is situated in a classified location.
Named NGINE (Next Generation Infrastructure), the new infrastructure greatly enhances HTX’s LLM training, modelling, and simulation capabilities by enabling the engineers to perform these tasks on demand, at speed and at scale.
Minister Tong (centre) initiates the launch of NGINE. (Photo: HTX/Damian Koh)
Building AI applications and training LLMs require a significant amount of computing power. Although HTX engineers could previously rely on conventional laptops and workstations for such tasks, these devices greatly restricted the pace of AI development when compared to top-of-the-line GPUs.
In other words, NGINE enables AI development to proceed much more quickly, efficiently and accurately, and will enable tools to be securely scaled for the Home Team.
Minister Tong said that he was happy to learn that HTX is the first in the region to acquire and operationalise an NVIDIA B200 DGX SuperPOD, which forms the core of NGINE. Powered by NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200 GPUs, the SuperPOD is comparable to some of the most advanced supercomputers in Singapore.
Minister Tong (front row, third from left) with members of HTX senior management and industry partners after the launch of NGINE. (Photo: HTX/Damian Koh)
“With AI surging from being an emerging trend to a true global force in the last couple of years, the speed of deployment is crucial to turn possibilities into capabilities – there’s really no time to lose. I’m therefore delighted that the NGINE project team built NGINE in just one year. This is really a remarkable achievement,” he said.
“In the years to come as we expand and push the envelope of our AI capabilities, we will look back at today as that one catalytic milestone that allowed us to achieve all of that. I look forward to us building even more transformative AI applications as a means to a very important end – to enhance Singapore’s safety and security.”
How else HTX stands to gain
Besides increased efficiency and convenience in building AI applications and training LLMs, NGINE also offers a host of other benefits. For example, it provides HTX’s engineers and scientists with the opportunity to understand the inner workings of AI infrastructure, and this precious knowledge would be crucial when setting up subsequent systems.
Moreover, they’ll also get to familiarise themselves with large AI models for R&D and experimental work. This experience will in turn allow them to apply their knowledge to manage operational workloads effectively.
NGINE is the Home Team’s very first AI infrastructure. To us, however, it is more than just infrastructure – NGINE is the bedrock of our ambition to become an AI-enabled Home Team, where AI can be brought safely to the most confidential data we hold, where safety and security can be built into the core of our AI applications.
Minister Tong takes a wefie with Xponents who were involved in the establishment of NGINE. (Photo: HTX/Damian Koh)
NGINE already powering AI products
Because of its massive computing power, NGINE will speed up development of effective AI applications to enhance the operations of the Home Team. What this means is that the Home Team will be better equipped to ensure public safety, which certainly cannot be understated because it has direct repercussions on the nation’s economy.
After all, Singapore has always been a magnet for investment because of its sterling reputation for being safe.
Presently, NGINE is already being used for the development of four AI MVPs. One of them is Teammate, a chatbot powered by state-of-the-art AI language models that would help boost productivity for Home Team officers and can be used to process data of higher classification. Another is Paperwork, an application that helps Home Team officers prepare procurement documentation more efficiently.
In the near future, NGINE would be used to power the further development of Phoenix, the Home Team’s very own series of LLMs that has been pre-trained on extensive corpuses of knowledge specific and relevant to the Home Team and Singapore.
HTX engineers have also been working alongside their counterparts from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Singapore Police Force (SPF) to create a highly customised, AI-powered Speech-to-Text software that suits the latter’s unique requirements. NGINE is expected to accelerate the development of this software, which is still in the development stage, in the near future.
HTX’s AI pipeline
According to Ng Pan Yong, HTX’s Chief Innovation Officer, NGINE will be used to drive the development of dozens of other AI innovations in the coming months.
HTX is also set to roll out more AI facilities between now and 2027. One of these facilities would host HEIDI, which is expected to be the 3rd sovereign Azure cloud globally and the first in the region.
HTX’s efforts to develop Embodied AI applications for public safety will benefit from the rolling out of more AI infrastructure in the years to come. (Photo: HTX/Law Yong Wei)
These additional data centres will also aid the AI development in major projects such as the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) by HTX.
Expected to be the world’s first humanoid robotics centre for public safety, this S$100 million facility will be launched in mid-2026 and undertake AI model training and robotics development, including research and development related to Embodied AI.
