OpenAI says rapidly growing demand from startups across the Asia-Pacific region has become one of its biggest operational challenges, even as the company expands its presence in Singapore with a commitment of more than US$300 million and plans to create over 200 jobs in the coming years.
Thomas Jeng, OpenAI’s head of startups for Asia-Pacific, told The Business Times that the pace of adoption has forced his team to continually reassess priorities as companies increasingly seek access to the company’s artificial intelligence models.
“We have so much demand that a lot of my day is spent triaging and re-prioritising,” Jeng said, adding that he returned from a one-week break to find around 800 emails waiting in his inbox. While AI tools can help process communications, he said human judgment remains essential in deciding priorities.
The growing demand comes as OpenAI expands its regional operations. The company announced a partnership with the Singapore government in May under which it will invest more than US$300 million in the country and add more than 200 roles over the next several years. Jeng said his startup team, currently consisting of more than 10 members, is also expanding.
Rather than relying primarily on marketing or sales efforts, Jeng said OpenAI focuses on giving startups direct access to its latest AI models and demonstrating their performance through side-by-side comparisons. According to him, that approach has contributed to increased customer adoption in recent months.
Although he declined to provide customer figures, Jeng said Singapore has become one of the top five global markets for OpenAI’s coding agent, Codex. He added that adoption of the product has increased roughly 17-fold since its release toward the end of last year, describing the pace of growth as unprecedented in his professional experience.
OpenAI is also seeking to strengthen the regional startup ecosystem through partnerships with venture capital firms, accelerator programs, workshops, and technical community events. Jeng said the company’s objective is to serve as an enabling platform rather than positioning itself at the center of the ecosystem.
One of OpenAI’s primary support mechanisms is its credits program, which distributes AI usage credits through venture capital firms and startup accelerators. Jeng said the initiative was launched with a budget worth several million dollars in credits and additional offers. Across the Asia-Pacific region, OpenAI has provided more than US$30 million in token credits through venture capital partnerships and hackathons.
Beyond financial support, the company offers technical assistance to startups building products with its AI models. Jeng said OpenAI teams based in Singapore and elsewhere in the region work directly with companies, including wealth management platform Endowus, while also helping founders connect with potential investors, customers, business partners, and startup communities in markets such as Japan and the United States.
Jeng said OpenAI is not primarily focused on persuading startups to rely exclusively on its technology, noting that many companies subscribe to multiple AI platforms. Instead, he said the company’s priority is ensuring broad access to its models while helping customers balance performance and cost by recommending models suited to specific business needs rather than automatically directing them to the newest releases.
Addressing concerns among startup founders that larger AI companies could eventually replicate their products, Jeng said OpenAI does not use customer data submitted through its application programming interface to train its models. He added that the company does not have access to customers’ model inputs or outputs through the API and remains focused on developing foundational AI models rather than competing across every application category.
“There’re plenty of things that they can build that we are just not going to go and build because of our own limitation,” Jeng said. “We can only sustain so many product services at once.”
