The company announced the move on Wednesday during the ATx Summit in Singapore, where it also launched “OpenAI for Singapore”, a partnership with the country’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI).

Under the initiative, OpenAI said it will commit more than S$300 million to Singapore and create about 200 technical roles over the next few years.

The company added that Singapore will become one of its global bases for Forward-Deployed Engineers, teams that work directly with businesses and public institutions to deploy AI systems.

The new lab will support projects tied to Singapore’s national AI priorities, especially in public services, healthcare, finance and digital infrastructure.

Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI, said the company sees Singapore as a key market because of its technical talent and long-term AI ambitions.

“We’re excited to partner with Singapore as it builds on its position as a global leader in AI,” she said.

“Singapore has strong technical talent, trusted institutions, and a clear ambition to use AI to drive long-term growth and improve people’s lives.”

She added: “Through OpenAI for Singapore, we want to help more organisations benefit from frontier AI, support the next generation of local AI talent, and widen access to these tools across the country.”

Singapore has spent the past few years positioning itself as a neutral and trusted centre for AI development in Asia. The government has steadily increased spending on AI research and infrastructure while encouraging global technology firms to expand operations in the country.

Authorities earlier pledged S$1 billion between 2025 and 2030 to strengthen public AI research capabilities. Tech giants including Google, Nvidia, AWS and Microsoft have also announced AI-related investments and partnerships in Singapore.

Alongside the OpenAI AI Lab deal, Singapore recently unveiled a National AI Partnership with Google focused on education, healthcare and enterprise innovation. Nvidia is also establishing a new AI research lab in the country to work with universities and government agencies.

The partnership with OpenAI will also include education and workforce programmes. OpenAI said it plans to work with Singapore’s Ministry of Education and GovTech on AI-powered learning tools, including support for Mother Tongue language learning.

The company will also launch a Singapore chapter of the OpenAI Academy, organise Codex hackathons for teachers and introduce a training programme for Forward-Deployed Engineers.

Singapore’s Permanent Secretary for Digital Development and Information, Chng Kai Fong, said the partnership shows the government’s drive to prepare its workforce and economy for AI adoption.

“With AI reshaping economies, businesses and the workforce, Singapore’s response has been deliberate: growing new sectors, anchoring global frontier companies here, and equipping our people with the skills to thrive in this new environment,” he said.

“This partnership with OpenAI reflects the Government’s commitment to developing Singapore’s AI capabilities, strengthening enterprise adoption of AI, and securing good jobs for Singaporeans.”

OpenAI said it also plans to support smaller businesses and startups through workshops, accelerator programmes and practical AI adoption initiatives.

Countries are currently competing to attract AI investment, talent and infrastructure. Singapore is not left out, standing alongside hubs such as London, Dubai and Silicon Valley to lead AI development.

Recent data from Slack’s Workforce Index showed that about 52% of workers in Singapore already use AI tools in their jobs, underlining how quickly adoption is spreading across the country’s economy.

The company confirmed on Thursday that it will not proceed with the British phase of the project for now, saying work will resume only when conditions support long-term investment.

Stargate UK, developed with Nvidia and British developer Nscale, was announced in September 2025 as part of a plan to expand global data centre capacity.

The project was expected to deploy up to 31,000 AI chips and strengthen the country’s ability to run its own artificial intelligence systems.

That capacity, usually called sovereign compute, allows a country to manage sensitive data and AI workloads locally instead of relying on overseas providers.

OpenAI said in a statement: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. AI compute is foundational to that goal, we continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

The decision is a setback for the UK government as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made artificial intelligence central to his economic plans and wants Britain to attract more global tech investment.

Officials insist talks are still ongoing. A spokesperson said the government is “continuing to work with OpenAI and other leading AI companies to strengthen UK compute capacity”.

At the same time, they pointed to more than £100 billion in private investment that has flowed into the UK’s AI sector since 2024.

The cost of energy is also a big issue. Britain has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, and large data centres require vast amounts of power to run and cool advanced chips. Regulation is another concern, especially those around data use and copyright.

OpenAI has been expanding its data centre footprint in other regions. Its Stargate programme includes projects in the United States, Norway and the United Arab Emirates. The first major campus is already underway in Texas.

The pause in the UK also comes as the company strengthens its focus. It has scaled back some side efforts and is concentrating more on core services like ChatGPT.

Competition is increasing, with companies such as Anthropic and Google pushing ahead with their own systems.

Despite the Stargate project delay, OpenAI says it will continue discussions with the UK government, including plans to support public services with its technology.

For now, the project is on hold, with no timeline for when work might begin.

The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, joined by EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital and six unicorn founders. 

Their support comes only months after the company’s two young founders topped AndroidWorld, an influential benchmark for mobile-device automation, beating long-established research groups from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research and Alibaba.

Unlike web developers, mobile teams usually wait weeks to push even small updates through. Minitap argues that this drag has held the industry back for years. 

The company says its platform lets teams work at a pace closer to the web, cutting feature-delivery cycles from six weeks to a few days.

Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Minitap’s co-founder and CEO, said the long delays in mobile development impacted their motivation. “We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline,” he said. He added that “Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company (Duolingo, Calm, Hinge etc) ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone.”

His co-founder, Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, stressed the need for faster testing across consumer apps. “Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster. The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that speed possible.”

The pair grew up in a small village in Burgundy, studied side by side, and later built several projects together before launching Minitap. Their path included early products, time in military school, engineering research, and work on drone infrastructure, an experience they now say gave them a rare mix of skills.

Investors appear to agree. Daniel Dippold, founder and CEO of EWOR, described the team’s speed and technical range as a competitive advantage. 

“Nicolas is leading one of the fastest teams I’ve seen. It comes from years of working together, knowing mobile inside out, and understanding how to build AI systems that hold up. The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem.”

Minitap’s platform is built on two key components: mobile-use, an open-source framework that allows automated systems to operate smartphones like real users; and minitap cloud, an infrastructure capable of spinning up thousands of mobile configurations at once. 

Together, these tools help teams generate code, test it across devices, flag errors, and deliver working features far faster than traditional workflows.

Their speedy progress on AndroidWorld brought attention earlier this year. Within their first 40 days, they reached the top of the benchmark and later released their framework openly, drawing more than 1,900 GitHub stars.

The seed round also attracted founders behind companies such as Hugging Face, Last.fm, Adjust, SumUp, FlixBus and Worldcoin, alongside operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain and LlamaIndex. Investors say the founders’ momentum was difficult to overlook. 

Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie Ventures said: “When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare. Nico and Luc are solving a massive problem that they uniquely understand and are moving at an urgent speed.”

Today, Minitap is being used by consumer mobile teams that want to run more experiments without expanding their engineering headcount. The company says its tools will eventually allow product managers to describe a feature, drop in a design, and have code generated and tested in a single afternoon.

Mercuri partner Esha Vatsa believes the long-term potential is vital. “Minitap is one of the first companies that is bringing agentic AI to mobile use and possibly the very first that is taking a full-stack approach to enable the use of AI coding agents for mobile app development. This is a substantial challenge and a huge opportunity that Nico and Luc are uniquely positioned to solve.”

Minitap founders say their vision is to enable the development of mobile apps that adapt themselves automatically, running experiments, studying user behaviour, generating improvements and rolling out new versions with minimal human involvement.

The programme will particularly target low- and middle-income countries, aiming to make the benefits of AI more widely accessible.

The Academy seeks to empower local developers and mission-driven organisations that are addressing challenges within their communities. 

In providing access to advanced AI technologies, the initiative intends to enhance efforts in sectors critical to sustainable development, including healthcare, education, and agriculture.

Despite the rapid growth of technology sectors in many emerging markets, access to advanced training and resources remains a challenge. The OpenAI Academy aims to bridge this gap by investing in local talent and infrastructure, which could lead to substantial economic advancements.

Key features of the OpenAI Academy include:

• Training and Expertise: Participants will receive guidance from OpenAI professionals, ensuring that developers have the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively implement AI solutions.
• API Credits: The initiative includes an initial allocation of $1 million in API credits, enabling participants to utilise OpenAI models for their innovative projects.
• Networking Opportunities: The Academy will facilitate a global community of developers, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing to enhance collective progress in AI applications.
• Support for Local Challenges: In partnering with philanthropic entities, the Academy will invest in projects that directly address community issues, promoting grassroots innovation.

This initiative builds on OpenAI’s goal of supporting AI development and education. Notable successes from previous programmes illustrate the prospective impact of targeted investment. For instance, KOBI, a recipient of the OpenAI prize, has created tools that assist students with dyslexia in learning to read. Similarly, I-Stem has utilised AI to improve access to educational resources for individuals with visual impairments in India.

In addition to the Academy, OpenAI has undertaken actions to broaden the accessibility of AI knowledge by translating important benchmarks into multiple languages, including Yoruba and Swahili. This is part of a wider strategy to ensure that AI technologies are relevant and effective across diverse cultural and economic contexts.

Through prioritisation of support for local developers who understand their communities, the OpenAI Academy aims to target AI applications to specific needs, ultimately enabling a wider demographic to leverage technology for meaningful solutions.

While the initiative, launched in collaboration with Google, was designed to support AI startups, many industry experts have said the fund lacks the capacity to make a significant impact in the sector.

Several tech professionals took to X (formerly Twitter) in response to the announcement, focusing on the size of the fund, which they argue is grossly inadequate for AI development. 

A recurring objection is that ₦100 million, equivalent to around $61,000, is insufficient for AI research, particularly when considering the high cost of infrastructure required to develop competitive AI technologies.

A number of commentators on Tijani’s X comment section pointed out that Google itself offers far more noteworthy support to individual startups through its various accelerator programs. 

Under the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa initiative, for example, selected startups receive as much as $350,000 in cloud credits alone. Comparing this to the government’s AI fund, which aims to spread approximately $60,000 across multiple startups, some have described the initiative as an underwhelming gesture.

Alex Onyia, CEO of an edtech startup, wrote: “₦100 million can’t even buy the hardware needed for serious AI development. In today’s economy, this is barely enough to cover the salary of an AI engineer for a year. If we want to push forward in this field, we need to think much bigger.”

Other tech insiders, like Jerry U., also pointed to the disparity between the Nigerian fund and international standards. He shared his personal experience of receiving a $200,000 grant from Google for his startup, contrasting this with what he called the “celebration” of a fund that offers less than a third of that amount. “We’re throwing a party for $60,000 while serious AI projects require millions just to get off the ground,” he complained.

Beyond funding issues, several commenters, including Citizen Olu, noted the huge hardware and computational requirements that accompany modern AI development. They noted that cutting-edge AI models depend on advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) and other powerful hardware from companies like NVIDIA and CEREBRAS. 

The costs of acquiring and maintaining such infrastructure, alongside the need for skilled AI professionals, are seen as prohibitive for any serious AI initiative that only has access to ₦100 million.

The general opinion from the tech community was that while the fund is a step in the right direction, it is not nearly enough to drive meaningful progress in AI innovation in Nigeria. Many believe that to truly compete on the global stage, Nigeria must adopt a better vision backed by larger investments.

In response to these critiques, the Ministry of Communications has highlighted the broader benefits of the initiative, including access to Google’s AI tools, mentorship, and a global network, which could provide valuable resources for Nigerian startups. However, whether these resources can compensate for the lack of direct financial support is not yet known.

Emerging markets like Nigeria are facing huge challenges in entering the AI space, where the high costs of research and development create limitations to participation. Without addressing the financial and infrastructural gaps, Nigeria may struggle to fully leverage the prospects of AI technologies, despite the government’s good intentions.