When Jordan Seow joined OpenAI in June 2025, he became the company’s first locally hired forward-deployed engineer in Asia-Pacific. At the time, the company’s Singapore office had fewer than 20 employees. The 29-year-old is now part of a rapidly expanding workforce being built by some of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies in the city state.
The growth is revealing something important about Singapore’s place in the global AI race. The city state is not emerging as a major centre for training the latest frontier models. Instead, it is developing a role further down the chain: adapting those models, integrating them into existing systems and turning them into practical tools that companies and public institutions can actually use.
Seow, who graduated in business analytics from the National University of Singapore in 2021 and previously worked at an AI start-up, now works directly with clients to build and integrate technical solutions into their existing infrastructure. He said the arrival of global AI companies was creating opportunities that extend beyond conventional research and software engineering.
“It also makes roles that combine technical depth, customer engagement and practical implementation more visible,” Seow said. “You don’t necessarily have to follow a purely research or software engineering path to contribute meaningfully to AI.”
The expansion accelerated this week when Anthropic announced plans for a Singapore office, becoming the latest major AI company to establish a presence there. It joins OpenAI, Meta Platforms’ Superintelligence Labs and Alphabet’s Google DeepMind.
Anthropic is currently advertising nine positions spanning applied AI, finance, marketing, public benefit and sales. OpenAI, meanwhile, has committed to creating more than 200 technical roles in Singapore as it develops its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States.
The attraction is partly geographic. Singapore offers a stable and well-connected base from which companies can reach Southeast Asian markets, while providing access to international talent. But the expansion also raises a question for the city state itself: how much of the investment will ultimately translate into high-value employment, technical expertise and lasting opportunities for Singaporeans?
Singapore’s AI strategy is unfolding against a broader technology rivalry between the United States and China. American AI companies are reportedly increasingly looking towards the city state as a place to recruit international engineers without confronting some of the visa restrictions, processing costs and longer waiting times associated with the United States.
Singapore, for its part, is actively seeking to position itself as what its Economic Development Board calls the world’s “most AI-powered economy”. The country currently offers a Tech.Pass for leading technology specialists, which is due to be replaced in January by a dedicated One Pass for AI and technology specialists.
Its updated national AI strategy aims to help 10,000 enterprises make meaningful use of AI over the next three years. From 2027, businesses will also receive enhanced tax deductions for spending on AI adoption.
The emphasis, however, is not on building the next frontier model from scratch. Stefan Winkler, head of AI & Data Science at the Singapore Institute of Technology’s Infocomm Technology Cluster, said the country’s advantages came from its access to Southeast Asia’s digital economy, regulatory stability, strong intellectual property protections and skilled workforce.
For companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, he said Singapore could serve as a base for “regional market development, enterprise deployment, partnerships, customer support, policy engagement, and talent recruitment”.
The benefits, in turn, could include high-value employment, talent development, foreign investment and closer links between global technology companies and Singapore’s universities, start-ups and state institutions.
Laurence Liew, director of AI innovation at AI Singapore, offered an even clearer description of the country’s position. “Frontier pre-training is not here,” he said.
Some research into localised adaptation is taking place, but Liew said the “thickest layer” of Singapore’s AI industry is deployment engineering. That distinction is becoming increasingly significant as companies move from demonstrating what AI models can do to integrating them into real organisations.
OpenAI committed more than S$300 million (US$235 million) in May under a joint agreement with the Singapore government. Google Cloud opened an engineering centre in Singapore on Tuesday in partnership with regional giants Grab and DBS. Microsoft is investing US$5.5 billion in local cloud and AI infrastructure through 2029.
“What is being built here is the layer that turns a model into something a bank, a hospital or a ministry can run in production,” Liew said. “That layer is the one Singapore has spent nine years getting good at.”
Yet the expansion of foreign AI companies does not automatically mean that the most valuable positions will be filled by Singaporeans. Linda Teo, country manager at ManpowerGroup Singapore, said technology multinationals generally hired locally for positions requiring knowledge of regional regulations, market conditions and business culture. Other employees, however, were frequently relocated from global headquarters during the establishment and early launch of new operations.
Liew said local recruitment tended to increase as companies’ operations matured.
Singapore has sought to strengthen that transition through training. AI Singapore’s apprenticeship programme has trained more than 500 apprentices, with more than 100 added each year. About 99 per cent of graduates were placed in roles within six months, while several companies have worked with AI Singapore to recruit forward-deployed engineers directly from the programme.
Some government grants also include local hiring requirements.
For Singaporeans, therefore, the immediate impact of the AI boom may not necessarily be access to the most senior positions. Instead, the potential lies in the gradual expansion of technical and customer-facing roles as international companies establish deeper operations in the city state.
That expansion also brings a parallel challenge. As AI moves further into finance, healthcare and public services, the consequences of deploying these systems become more significant, making questions of accountability increasingly important.
“In many ways, Singapore’s approach has been pragmatic,” Winkler said. “Remain open to innovation, but ensure that organisations deploying AI are accountable for how these systems are used.”
Singapore’s emerging role in artificial intelligence is therefore defined less by the race to train ever larger models than by what happens after those models exist. Its bet is on the difficult middle layer between technological capability and practical use: the engineers, partnerships, infrastructure, regulations and skills needed to make AI work inside the institutions of the real economy.
As OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and others deepen their presence, Singapore is positioning itself not necessarily as the place where the next frontier model is born, but as one of the places where those models are put to work.
