The question arose after a global meeting of a buzzing AI industry earlier this month gathered around 10,000 participants at the plush Marina Bay Sands expo hall. The organizers later announced a potentially more convenient date for the next edition.
Peter Noszek, co-founder of the SuperAI conference believes that Singapore might be in a great spot, occupying a strategic position in between the US and China, the dominant players in the space, currently locked in an arms race for hegemony. While the US with its potent frontier models has taken the lead in the enterprise world, the Chinese open source models are swiftly catching up, appealing to consumers that look for more affordable solutions.
Singapore could benefit both sides. It already brings together infrastructure builders, developers, policy makers and researchers on neutral ground, at the intersection of the East and West. It further boasts an innovation-friendly environment and a society with an overall favorable view on the industry, a skilled workforce and capital-rich investors.
Both GIC and Temasek have participated with significant amounts in the funding rounds of Anthropic and OpenAI. Singapore’s enthusiastic developer community, meanwhile, celebrates the ongoing AI revolution with regular meetups across the city, experimenting with the latest iterations of DeepSeek and Claude.
The country offers a gateway for Chinese firms to connect with the Western world and for US companies to enter Asia. Anthropic and OpenAI are aggressively expanding their labs in the city-state. China’s tech behemoths with significant AI initiatives, such as Tencent, Alibaba or ByteDance, already have a visible presence here. It could be an ideal location for a world-leading conference one might think.
The SuperAI event already lined up senior representatives from nearly all relevant firms in the sector, discussing the latest in the ongoing infrastructure build-out and model development. The actual AI superstars and thought leaders however didn’t show up (yet).
The role of headline speaker fell to tech investor and innovator Balaji Srinivasan who also has a favorable view on the region, to an extent that he moved his domicile to Asia.
Srinivasan, who is a regular in Singapore’s tech event scene, runs his latest venture, the Network School, from the fringe of the city, just across the border in Johor, Malaysia. The school hosts a bunch of digital nomads trying to solve current-world problems. It organizes talks such as the Quantum Day, earlier this month, analyzing how quantum computers might threaten the underlying cryptography of bitcoin.
Another top event for Singapore?
Similarly to SuperAI, Srinivasan organizes his Network State conference in Marina Bay Sands, which celebrates tech utopists and libertarian ideas, debating concepts like seasteading, private money and longevity. The event is held in proximity to the Formula One race, Milken Summit and Token2049 that make Singapore for a few days the global center of the conference circus attracting high-caliber speakers from all over the world.
Token2049, the sister event of SuperAI, has turned into the Woodstock of crypto, drawing 25,000 visitors to the Marina Bay area. It has in past editions also been luring celebrities like Donald Trump Jr., the Winklevoss twins or Vlad Tenev, founder of the brokerage app Robinhood.
AI is likely to be a main focus at this year’s meeting in early October. So are prediction markets, another hot topic du jour, with Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan already confirmed as speaker.
The next SuperAI conference, meanwhile, has been scheduled for September 2027, likely to make it easier for the industry megastars to participate. It might provide the city with another shiny event and possibly help cement Singapore’s vital role for the global tech scene.