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 focus is tougher this time because Alphabet’s recent surge has challenged long-held beliefs about first mover advantage.

Across Big Tech, spending plans are expanding at a rate the sector has never seen. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet are expected to raise their combined investment in AI by about 30% this year, pushing total outlay beyond $500 billion. 

This explains the unease on Wall Street. Investors are no longer impressed by scale; they want results from these Big Tech earnings.

Microsoft, once viewed as the early winner after backing OpenAI, is now being questioned. Its shares and Meta’s have both fallen more than 6% over the past three months of 2025. 

Amazon, helped by its November deal with OpenAI, edged up 5.1%, while Alphabet’s stock climbed nearly 29%, driven by strong feedback on Google’s Gemini 3 model and its deal to power Apple’s revamped Siri.

“Alphabet has the upper hand in the AI race as investors recognize that proprietary ecosystems, such as Apple and Search in Google, are tough to penetrate,” said David Wagner, head of equities at Aptus Capital Advisors. “Like in the internet boom, the first-mover advantage doesn’t always win the marathon.”

Microsoft and Meta will report their earnings on Wednesday, with other Big Tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon following next week.

Forecasts note Google Cloud growth picked up to about 35% in the last quarter of 2025, while Microsoft’s Azure is expected to slow slightly to 38.8%. Amazon Web Services is seen growing just over 21%, still modest by historical standards.

The concern is whether companies using this technology are actually seeing benefits. A recent PwC survey of 4,454 chief executives found that more than half reported no revenue gains or cost savings from their investments so far.

“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said at Davos.

Microsoft’s own challenges are increasing. Analysts at Morgan Stanley describe sentiment around the company as a “wall of worry,” noting stronger competition in cloud services and its reliance on OpenAI, where it holds a 27% stake. 

The company has also warned that shortages in AI capacity will last until at least June, while high memory chip prices are weighing on the wider PC market, a key part of its Windows and Xbox business. 

Revenue growth for the quarter is expected to slow to about 15.3%, the weakest in three quarters.

Alphabet, by contrast, is benefiting from tighter links between AI and its core search business, alongside a steadier advertising market. It is also opening new ground by supplying its Tensor Processing Units to Anthropic, a move worth tens of billions of dollars and a break from its long-standing policy of keeping those chips for internal use.

Stronger ad targeting and recommendations are expected to lift Meta’s revenue by more than 20%, but heavy spending on elite AI hires is set to drag profits to their lowest level in almost three years. 

Meanwhile, growth in Amazon’s North American retail arm is slowing, but AWS is showing gradual improvement, helped by renewed confidence in its AI strategy.

The Santa Clara-based chipmaker’s stock climbed nearly 5% in premarket trading on Wednesday, briefly touching $4.94 trillion before settling around $4.89 trillion in market value.

The rally followed Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s announcement of $500 billion in AI chip bookings and plans to build seven new supercomputers for the U.S. government.

Speaking at Nvidia’s developer conference in Washington, Huang disclosed that one of the supercomputers will be developed in partnership with Oracle and powered by 100,000 of Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips. 

The firm also confirmed a $100 billion partnership with OpenAI to develop GPU supercomputers and a $2 billion equity investment in Elon Musk’s xAI.

Nvidia’s transformation from a niche graphics card maker into the backbone of the artificial intelligence ecosystem has been commendable. The company now sits ahead of Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet in valuation growth.

“In many ways, everything that could have gone right for the firm, has gone right over the last sort of 24 hours,” said Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone.

For its fiscal second quarter of 2026, Nvidia reported revenue of $46.7 billion, a 56% increase year-on-year, with data-centre GPUs accounting for 88% of sales. The company’s stock added roughly $230 billion in value within a single day, illustrating its market-moving power.

Analysts, however, warn that Nvidia’s valuation, trading at about 50 times forward earnings, leaves little room for error. Given its dominant weighting in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, any major price movement could send ripples through pension funds, ETFs, and technology portfolios across global markets.

Beyond the markets, Nvidia has also become an important player in U.S.–China technology diplomacy. Its Blackwell processors are at the heart of Washington’s export restrictions, aimed at limiting China’s access to advanced AI computing systems. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he might raise the issue of the high-end chips when he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping.

To remain compliant with these export rules, Nvidia is designing modified versions of its chips for overseas markets, a strategy to sustain demand while scaling through geopolitical pressure. This could ultimately speed up the $5 trillion valuation reach for Nvidia.

The arrangement, finalised in May 2025 after months of negotiations, went live this quarter, making OpenAI one of Google Cloud’s biggest customers to date.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, confirmed the deal during Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, stating:

“We are very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud. Google Cloud is an open platform, and we have a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs, etc. So super excited about our partnership there on the cloud side, and we look forward to investing more in that relationship and growing that.”

OpenAI’s demand for compute has surged to historic levels, with projections indicating over one million GPUs will be online by the end of 2025. Its longer-term goal involves scaling to 100 million GPUs over the next decade. 

This explosive growth has outpaced Microsoft Azure’s capacity, the company’s primary cloud partner, forcing OpenAI to look elsewhere.

Google Cloud, once kept at arm’s length by OpenAI due to its rivalry with Microsoft and shared ambitions in AI, now enters the scene with a compelling offer: access to Nvidia’s top-tier H100 and GB200 GPUs, custom-built TPUs, and a mature infrastructure trusted by leading AI research outfits including Anthropic, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence.

The exclusivity OpenAI once held with Microsoft ended quietly in January 2025. Under the new “right of first refusal” framework, OpenAI gained the freedom to diversify its backend. 

The company’s operations now span data centres in Oregon, Iowa, Frankfurt, Milan, Singapore, and Tokyo, optimised for low-latency inference and strict sovereign compliance. Workloads are split across Azure and Google Cloud using orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Anthos, and Istio.

This development reveals the pressure OpenAI faces in scaling its services while maintaining uptime, responsiveness, and sustainability commitments. Both firms have pledged to power AI workloads with 100% carbon-free energy, and will publish energy transparency metrics in line with grid-optimised strategies.

While OpenAI remains the most direct threat to Google’s crown jewel, Search, the economic logic behind this partnership is clear. Google Cloud posted a $13.62 billion revenue haul in Q2 2025, up 32% year-on-year. 

Much of that growth comes from AI workloads, prompting Alphabet to raise its capital expenditure target for the year to $85 billion, noting “strong and growing demand” across both AI and cloud services.

Still, the optics are awkward. OpenAI’s ChatGPT product has chipped away at Google’s dominance in Search, forcing the tech giant to hasten development on its own generative AI offerings like Gemini. 

That chatbot now reaches 450 million monthly users, while AI Overviews on Search reportedly sees 2 billion monthly users. But the monetisation strategy behind those products is not well explained.

Some analysts are comparing this move to Google’s early relationship with Yahoo, when it quietly powered Yahoo Search in its early days, only to displace it as the internet’s front page. 

Hopefully, history will not repeat itself.