Sea has established an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore to deepen its in-house AI capabilities and speed up deployment across its businesses.
The centre was set up with support from Digital Industry Singapore, a joint office of the Economic Development Board, Enterprise Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority.
The initiative will support both AI research and business applications, while advancing its proprietary technology stack and broader ambition to become an AI-native company.
The AI CoE will focus on foundation model development, evaluation frameworks and internal tooling, while also turning research into production-ready applications that can be deployed at scale.
It will also help build AI talent and test new operating models enabled by AI.
Over the next three years, Sea expects the centre to create demand for at least 100 research and innovation roles in Singapore across AI research, engineering and product development.
The centre will also deepen the sophistication and application of Sea’s in-house AI models, including Compass Max v3.5, a 245 billion-parameter large language model tailored for Southeast Asian languages and e-commerce use cases.
Compass Max v3.5 and its variants are already being used to power AI features across Shopee’s e-commerce platform.
“This AI Centre of Excellence reflects Sea’s long-term commitment to investing in talent and innovation in Singapore.
Such homegrown AI capabilities also contribute to the wider AI ecosystem in Singapore, which we are excited to partner with the government on growing and developing.”
said Forrest Li, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Sea Limited.
The initiative is supported by DISG and aligns with Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 and Budget 2026 priorities.
“This investment by Sea strengthens our position as a global AI hub with cutting-edge capabilities in Singapore.
The new AI CoE will create new innovation roles in areas such as AI engineering and product development, providing Singaporeans an opportunity to create AI products with a global reach.”
said Philbert Gomez, Senior Vice President, Executive Director and Head Digital Industry Singapore.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by Polycube via Freepik
