Singapore has spent decades selling the world on the promise that it can be trusted by all sides. For a new generation of AI companies, that pledge has never been more valuable.
“All the AI companies I work with, whether they’re from China, Korea or Japan, all use Singapore as a hub,” Gunja Gargeshwari, the chief revenue officer of Israel-headquartered web scraping firm Bright Data, told Fortune on the sidelines of the SuperAI summit in Singapore. “It’s easiest to operate in the region if I have people in Singapore—it’s where conversations are happening, and where the innovation hubs for different providers are being set up.” Bright Data, for instance, has chosen to position Singapore as its APAC headquarters, even though 60% of its Asian customer base hails from China and India.
“We have the chance to stand out here,” said Nathan Xu, the CEO of San Francisco-based AI notetaker company Plaud. “Unlike many companies that originate entirely from the U.S., if Plaud can position ourselves aggressively in Singapore, then we’re a cool company to prospective users across the globe.”
Singapore’s appeal to the AI industry is as much due to geopolitics as economics. The country markets itself as an economic safe haven, with a long track record of regulatory clarity and strong governance.
The AI build-out in Singapore reflects a broader change across the industry. Global AI firms are shifting away from training massive models to instead figuring out how to monetize their work in the real world.
“For some of my Chinese customers, the researchers can’t leave the country without telling the government—I kid you not,” said Gargeshwari. “So opening an office in Singapore and having local employees is a necessity for them to do business.”
For U.S. AI firms, overseas markets like those in Asia Pacific represent a massive untapped customer base.
OpenAI opened a regional office in Singapore in 2024. Last month, the firm committed 300 million Singapore dollars ($234 million) to growing the country’s AI ecosystem. It also announced the opening of an applied AI lab—the first outside of the U.S.—which is set to make Singapore one of its hubs for forward deployed engineers: specialized software engineers who embed directly within customer organizations to customize and deploy tech solutions.
Anthropic is betting on enterprise AI instead of the consumer market, which makes Singapore, where many MNCs house their APAC headquarters, a natural choice.
Yet, foreign governments are starting to challenge Singapore’s neutrality.
In the end, Manus’s legal status as a Singapore company didn’t matter: its continued footprint in China was enough for Beijing to decide it had jurisdiction.
The U.S., too, could hurt Singapore’s AI ambitions. Last week, the U.S. government barred non-U.S. individuals from using Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model. Singapore could end up losing access to powerful frontier models from U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
“We feel like we are welcomed here,” Xu said. “We didn’t know we’d be able to set up such a big and meaningful presence here; a year ago, we had zero people here, but now we have close to a hundred.”
