Singapore to spend up to S$500 million on AI compute, S$27 million on AI training for students

SINGAPORE will invest up to S$500 million in high-performance compute resources to support artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and capacity building, said Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Janil Puthucheary on Friday (Mar 1).

These compute resources – that is, computer processing power – will support use cases in sectors such as financial services, healthcare, transportation and logistics.

“Over time, we hope for this seed funding to catalyse greater development and use of AI in Singapore, and spur additional industry investment in compute infrastructure,” he said during his ministry’s Committee of Supply debate.

In a media release, MCI said that the funds could be used to lease AI compute as a service from external providers, or to site AI compute within facilities owned by the government or research partners.

Demand currently outstrips supply of powerful graphics processing units used to train and run AI models.

The ministry did not reveal how much compute resources the government aims to lease or acquire in total; how it would select projects to use the resources; nor how the cost of using such resources could be shared with users.

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Separately, to support growing AI demand, the government aims to triple the pool of local AI practitioners to 15,000 over the next five years. Such practitioners are expected to be able to implement and deploy AI systems, models and algorithms in organisations.

In the next three years, the government will invest S$20 million to enhance AI practitioner training for students. This will fund more AI-related SG Digital scholarships for Singaporean undergraduate, masters and PhD students, and facilitate access to overseas internships in AI-related roles.

Another S$7 million will go towards the AI Accelerated Masters Programme, launched in collaboration with local universities.

This will only be open to Singaporeans, and aims to support 50 students over the next three years. Applications are expected to be open from March to May this year.

Undergraduates who join the programme can condense their Masters by Research degree training to one year, from the usual two years. This is done by overlapping their training period with their final year of undergraduate study.

Separately, a new AI Visiting Professorship programme hopes to attract visiting professors to collaborate with Singapore. It aims to award a pilot batch of five such professors over the next few years. A professor who might benefit from the programme is Dr Koh Pang Wei, an award-winning AI researcher who is Singaporean and is currently based at the University of Washington.

His focus on AI models that work with imperfect data was highly sought after during the pandemic, noted Communications and Information Minister Josephine Teo, when he developed novel methods to estimate the movements of people from raw data.

“As much as we would like him to come home, we also recognise the value of the networks he’s plugged into because of his current appointment,” she said.

To qualify for the programme, the professors will need to identify a Singapore collaborator to anchor their activities here, and spend at least 20 per cent of their time on the collaboration. The ministry did not specify how much would be spent to fund the programme.