Singapore will invest more than S$1 billion ($778.8 million) in public artificial intelligence research through 2030, deepening a multi-year push to position the city-state as a leading hub for AI development, deployment, and governance.
The Ministry of Digital Development and Information said on Saturday that the funding will be directed at priority research areas, including the development of responsible and resource-efficient AI systems, as well as building a domestic pipeline of talent spanning pre-university education, tertiary institutions, and faculty-level research.
The government said part of the investment will also be used to strengthen national capabilities that support the adoption and application of AI across industries, signaling a continued emphasis on translating research into commercial and public-sector use.
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The latest commitment builds on a series of large public investments that have steadily expanded Singapore’s AI ecosystem over the past three years. In 2024, the government set aside S$500 million to secure high-performance computing resources, a move aimed at easing access to the costly infrastructure required to train and deploy advanced AI models in both the private and public sectors. Around the same period, it committed more than S$500 million to AI research and development through AI Singapore, a national programme created to anchor deep AI capabilities within the country.
These investments have helped Singapore move beyond policy ambition into model development and deployment. In 2023, researchers under AI Singapore released an open-source large language model known as Southeast Asian Languages in One Network, or Sea-Lion, backed by S$70 million in public funding. The model was designed to address a gap in AI systems trained primarily on Western and Chinese language data, and it has since been adopted by regional companies, including Indonesia’s GoTo.
A newer version of Sea-Lion was released in October 2025. It was built on top of Qwen, a foundation model developed by China’s Alibaba, and expanded to improve performance in a wide range of regional languages, including Burmese, Filipino, Indonesian, Malay, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese. The update underscored Singapore’s strategy of combining open-source collaboration with targeted national investment to produce systems that are regionally relevant and commercially usable.
Officials have increasingly framed AI as both an economic and strategic priority. By focusing funding on responsible and resource-efficient AI, the government is signaling awareness of growing global concerns around energy use, safety, and governance, at a time when the scale and cost of training frontier models continue to rise. The emphasis on talent development from an early stage also reflects concerns that access to skilled researchers and engineers could become a binding constraint as global competition for AI expertise intensifies.
The new funding pledge comes as governments worldwide race to secure AI capabilities through public spending, industrial policy, and partnerships with the private sector. While the United States and China continue to dominate spending at the frontier level, smaller economies such as Singapore are carving out niches by focusing on applied research, regional language models, and frameworks for trusted deployment.
The approach aligns with Singapore’s broader economic strategy that prioritizes technology adoption, workforce upskilling, and regional relevance over sheer scale. The government is seeking to ensure that AI becomes embedded across sectors rather than remaining concentrated in research labs, by coupling large investments in compute and research with practical support for industry adoption.
The Ministry of Digital Development and Information said the new investment will run through 2030, providing long-term funding certainty at a time when AI research cycles and infrastructure planning increasingly span multiple years.