Opinion

OpenAI has released country-level data on ChatGPT usage for the first time. In the accompanying Signals dataset, Singapore ranks first among 147 countries in per-capita message volume. The proportion of "getting it to do things" in work contexts is more than twice that in non-work contexts; multimedia is the fastest-growing use case; and the share of messages from people aged 35 and above is rising in nearly every country—Singapore is one of the rare exceptions.

Temasek's 2026 annual report devotes a full chapter to AI: AI-related investments currently account for 6% of the portfolio, with a target of 10–15% by March 2031. This article maps out the four pillars, this year's acquisition list, and several institutions based locally in Singapore.

At a roundtable at NUS Global Entrepreneurship Forum Singapore, the moderator posed four questions about enterprise AI: how to choose a model, what the core competitive advantage of the next generation of companies will be, how CEO capabilities will change, and what a truly AI Native Company is. Here are my answers—one principle with two exceptions, betting on Data, CEOs must personally have a sense for AI, and AI-native companies organized around data.

In May 2026 Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H with GIC as co-lead and Temasek as a significant investor — Singapore's two sovereign funds on the same frontier AI company's cap table. This piece surveys every publicly known AI investment by GIC and Temasek: frontier models, AI infrastructure, data platforms, each with date, scale, and source tier.

Anthropic's March 2026 Economic Index ranks countries by Claude usage intensity, normalized by population, and Singapore comes first at 5.53. The number measures per-capita adoption intensity — not absolute volume, and not how advanced the usage is. Singapore's top spot rests on a sustained policy push and on its base as a small, rich, English-speaking, knowledge-worker-dense city-state.

At ATxSummit on 20 May 2026, Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo announced an update to the National AI Strategy, establishing four National AI Missions: Advanced Manufacturing, Connectivity, Finance, and Healthcare. Also announced on the same day were the NVIDIA Singapore AI Research Lab and a multi-operator robot testbed at Punggol Digital District.