Singapore has no intention of passively watching the artificial intelligence arms race. While global attention is focused on Silicon Valley and Beijing giants, the City of Lion is steadily building its own ecosystem, based on strategic public investment. The government’s latest pledge of more than one billion Singapore dollars for AI research by 2030 signals that the city-state wants to be more than just a safe haven for capital – it aspires to be a regional architect of technology.
Singapore’s strategy is different from a purely profit-driven approach. The Ministry of Digital Development and Information emphasises the development of artificial intelligence that is not only efficient, but above all responsible and resource-efficient. It is a pragmatic approach: in a region with limited physical resources, optimising computing power is as important as the algorithms themselves. Funding is to flow in a broad stream – from the education of future human resources, starting as early as pre-university level, to support for deployment in specific industries.
A key piece of this puzzle is the Sea-Lion (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) project. This is where Singapore finds its market niche. While Western models often fail to address the cultural and linguistic nuances of Southeast Asia, Sea-Lion bridges this gap. The latest version of the model, released in autumn 2025, builds on the Qwen foundation from Alibaba, demonstrating Singapore’s strategic flexibility to use the best available technology, regardless of its origin.
Singapore is building infrastructure that lowers the barrier to entry for local companies. Examples such as Indonesia’s GoTo, which has already adopted Sea-Lion’s solutions, demonstrate that there is a real demand for ‘local’ intelligence. By investing in high-performance computing resources and open language models, the Singapore government is de facto subsidising private sector innovation. This is a model lesson in building competitive advantage through state patronage of technology that is set to become the backbone of Asia’s modern economy.
