A Homegrown Champion’s AI Bet
Sea Limited, the Singapore-founded global technology company behind Shopee, Garena, and SeaMoney, announced in April 2026 the establishment of an Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence in Singapore. Supported by Digital Industry Singapore, the centre reinforces Sea’s commitment to investing in its proprietary technology stack and advances its ambition to become an AI-native company. Unlike the many foreign multinationals establishing AI facilities in Singapore, Sea’s initiative represents a homegrown champion deepening its roots in the city-state while competing on a global scale.
Three Pillars of the AI CoE
Sea’s AI Centre of Excellence is organised around three strategic capability areas. The first is foundational AI: advancing foundation model development, evaluation frameworks, and internal tooling to stay close to frontier developments in the field. The second is scalable deployment: translating R&D advances into production-ready solutions that can be sustainably deployed at scale to enhance user experience, efficiency, and measurable business objectives. The third is AI-native talent and new operating models: nurturing a pool of AI-native talent and experimenting with new operating models enabled by AI technology.
Compass Max v3.5: A Southeast Asian LLM
A centrepiece of Sea’s AI capabilities is Compass Max v3.5, a 245 billion parameter Large Language Model tailored for Southeast Asian languages and e-commerce contexts. Developed in-house, Compass Max v3.5 and its variants are already in live use powering numerous AI features across Shopee’s e-commerce platform, operating with greater responsiveness and at a fraction of the cost of other leading commercially served LLMs. This is a significant achievement: it demonstrates that a Southeast Asian company can build and deploy frontier-scale AI models optimised for the region’s linguistic and commercial realities, rather than relying solely on models developed for Western or Chinese markets.
Talent and Job Creation
The AI Centre of Excellence is expected to create demand for at least 100 R&D and innovation-centric roles in Singapore over the next three years, with activities spanning AI research, engineering, and product development. These are high-value positions that contribute directly to Singapore’s knowledge economy and provide opportunities for local talent to work on AI products with global reach. Forrest Li, Chairman and CEO of Sea, described the centre as reflecting Sea’s long-term commitment to investing in talent and innovation in Singapore, noting that homegrown AI capabilities also contribute to the wider AI ecosystem.
Alignment with National Priorities
The initiative aligns closely with Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 and Budget 2026 priorities, which emphasise both the development of local AI capabilities and the creation of high-quality jobs in technology. Philbert Gomez of Digital Industry Singapore highlighted that Sea’s investment strengthens Singapore’s position as a global AI hub with cutting-edge capabilities, and that the new centre will create innovation roles in AI engineering and product development, providing Singaporeans the opportunity to create AI products with global reach. Sea’s model—building proprietary AI capability at scale while contributing to the national talent pipeline—offers a template for how homegrown technology companies can anchor their global ambitions in Singapore’s AI ecosystem.
