NCS Says Chinese Open AI Models Gaining Ground Among Singapore Organisations
Source: Computer Weekly
Chinese open-weight AI models are gaining significant traction among organisations in Singapore, according to NCS. Edward Chen, NCS' first chief AI officer, told a media briefing that the best open-weight models are coming from China with very good adoption among their clients — including government
Chinese open-weight AI models are gaining significant traction among organisations in Singapore, according to NCS, the Singtel-owned technology services provider. Edward Chen, NCS' first chief AI officer, told a media briefing that "the best open-weight models in the world are actually coming from China, with very good adoption among our clients" — including government customers. The remarks came at NCS AI Impact 2026, the firm's annual technology forum held on July 9.
Unlike proprietary models from US AI labs, which are typically accessed over the cloud, open-weight models can be downloaded and deployed on an organisation's own infrastructure at a fraction of the cost. NCS itself has folded Alibaba's Qwen models into its own products, including its NCS GPT assistant, and announced a partnership with Alibaba Cloud to take enterprise AI across the region. The company is betting that its fluency in both American and Chinese AI stacks — at a time when the two ecosystems are pulling apart — gives it a unique competitive advantage.
At the forum, NCS launched six additions to its Sunshine.AI suite of "sovereign, enterprise-grade" AI platforms, including Sunshine.core for building and running AI agent fleets, Sunshine.commanderAI for managing multi-vendor robot fleets, Sunshine.guardian for AI governance, and Sunshine.chilliclaw — named after Singapore's beloved chilli crab — an enterprise version of the OpenClaw assistant rewritten for security. The firm also announced a joint AI centre of excellence with IHH Healthcare, agentic AI pilots with NHG Health, and an AI tutor at Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, who graced the event, offered a note of caution amid the race to deploy AI. "We cannot charge ahead, driven solely by commercial considerations, even as recursive AI systems gain self-reinforcing intelligence, agency and influence," he said. "We must be wiser and more humanistic. We must decide deliberately where to embrace AI, where to rein it in, and where human judgement and effort must prevail." He also outlined plans for a common electronic medical record system across all three public healthcare clusters by 2028 and an update on the Simfoni clinical AI model programme.
Why it matters for Singapore: NCS' embrace of Chinese open-weight models signals a pragmatic shift in Singapore's AI sourcing strategy. While US export controls and security concerns dominate headlines, Singaporean enterprises — including government agencies — are voting with their wallets for affordable, locally deployable alternatives from China. This East-meets-West positioning is uniquely Singaporean: few other countries can credibly straddle both ecosystems. For the broader SG AI landscape, the trend means lower barriers to AI adoption across the public and private sectors, but also raises questions about data sovereignty and the long-term implications of building critical AI infrastructure on Chinese foundation models.