It's a Two-Horse Race for the AI Crown — Where Does That Leave Singapore?
Source: The Straits Times
The artificial intelligence race is and will remain a contest between two superpowers — the United States and China — and Singapore's best move isn't trying to compete on their terms, argues economist Linda Lim in a sharp Straits Times opinion piece.
The artificial intelligence race is and will remain a contest between two superpowers — the United States and China — and Singapore's best move isn't trying to compete on their terms, argues economist Linda Lim in a sharp Straits Times opinion piece. The Republic lacks the market size, talent pool, and risk capital to build foundational AI models from scratch, but that doesn't mean it's sidelined. Lim makes the case that Singapore's real opportunity lies in becoming the indispensable gateway for AI deployment across Southeast Asia.
The piece lands at an interesting moment. While US tech giants pour billions into frontier model development and China leverages state support and hardware manufacturing dominance, Singapore has steadily accumulated advantages that matter more for adoption than invention. Regulatory stability, rule of law, a multilingual workforce, and world-class digital infrastructure have already attracted over 70 AI centres of excellence from the likes of OpenAI, Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and KPMG. These facilities are turning Singapore into a testbed for applied AI rather than a creator of the underlying models.
Lim argues that Singapore should focus on adaptation, deployment, and governance of AI for the region. The Southeast Asian market — with its hundreds of millions of consumers, fragmented regulatory landscape, and rapidly digitising economies — needs a neutral, trusted hub to connect global AI capabilities with local demand. That's a role no other city-state can play as credibly. The piece also flags a "parallel revolution" Singapore must execute domestically: massive investment in AI education, worker retraining to manage displacement, and focus on high-value application verticals like finance, logistics, smart city management, and biomedical sciences.
The opinion comes amid a broader debate about Singapore's AI strategy. The government has committed over $1 billion under the National AI Strategy 2.0, but questions remain about whether the benefits of AI adoption are reaching frontline workers fast enough and whether the city-state's SMEs are keeping pace with larger enterprises. Lim's central thesis — that Singapore shouldn't try to out-innovate the US or China but instead own the adoption layer for a region of 700 million people — offers a coherent answer to those questions.
Why it matters for Singapore: Getting the strategic framing right matters because it determines where capital, talent, and policy attention flow. If Singapore's leaders and businesses internalise the "adoption hub, not model builder" thesis, the investment priorities shift — more funding for applied AI in finance and logistics, stronger emphasis on AI education and workforce retraining, and deeper partnerships with Southeast Asian governments that need Singapore's infrastructure and governance. It's a pragmatic argument that trades the glamour of frontier AI for the durability of being indispensable to someone else's AI revolution.