Singapore will be setting aside an additional S$180 million to accelerate fundamental and translational AI research on top of the S$500 million that has been committed so far, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic Policies, Heng Swee Keat at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) today.
One of the areas where Singapore will invest more funds is resource-efficient AI as its datasets are small for the island nation.
Additionally, Heng had also announced the roll out of two national AI programmes targeting the finance and government sectors.
The National AI Programme in Finance includes NovA! – an industry-wide AI platform for financial risk insights generation which is a collaboration between Singapore-based banks and local fintech firms.
In the initial phase, NovA! will focus on helping financial institutions better assess companies’ environmental impact and identify emerging environmental risks.
Over the next three decades, an estimated US$100 trillion of climate-aligned funding will be needed to achieve the Paris Agreement targets.
NovA! will better enable financial institutions to assess these investments and their associated risks, and check against greenwashing.
Meanwhile, the National AI Programme in Government aims to improve public sector service delivery in several ways, by understanding the pain points better to serve the citizens.
Heng had previously announced the launch of Singapore’s National AI Strategy at the 2019 edition of the SFF event where he identified five national AI programmes which have reportedly made good progress.

The DPM added,
“Our national AI strategy also involves building a vibrant AI eco-system for sustained innovation, and a strong commitment to AI R&D. We are seeing initial returns on our research efforts. Singapore has been ranked first for AI publication impact. This is partly the result of the close collaboration between our industry partners and researchers.”