Salesforce Joins Microsoft, OpenAI and Other Tech Giants in Singapore With $1B AI Investment

• Cloud-based software giant Salesforce will invest $1 billion in Singapore.
• The Southeast Asian country is becoming a burgeoning hub for AI innovation and development.
• Asian governments are introducing various attractive initiatives to gain investment from tech companies.

On Wednesday, March 12, Salesforce announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.

The investment comes as Singapore attracts major investments from leading tech giants, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon.

Ranked third globally for AI investment, according to Tortoise, the city-state continues to strengthen its digital economy as big tech increasingly moves to capitalize on attractive Asian government initiatives.

Salesforce Invests $1 Billion in Singapore

Salesforce said its $1 billion investment would turbocharge its AI offering, Agentforce, and accelerate Singapore’s digital transformation.

The software company launched its newest Agentforce in February. The program is designed to power “every process, workload, and application with dynamic reasoning, decision making, and action orchestration” through AI agents.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC that Singapore has allowed the company to develop “extremely advanced AI.”

“We have had a fantastic experience here. We’ve been here for about 25 years at Salesforce, and we’re investing another $1 billion in our operations here,” Benioff told the publication at a conference on Wednesday.

“We don’t just do sales and marketing here. We also do extremely advanced artificial intelligence development,” he added. “We have dozens of some of the very best AI engineers in the world here in our Singapore research center.”

Salesforce says Agentforce can help Singapore “rapidly expand” its labor force in several public sector roles to address the country’s aging population.

Singapore’s Growing AI Hub

Singapore is rapidly positioning itself as a global hub for AI, investing heavily in infrastructure, research, and talent development to attract top tech firms and drive innovation.

The Southeast Asian country has invested S$1 billion ($767 million) over the next five years as part of its National AI Strategy 2.0, the country’s tourism board wrote in the Financial Times .

This large-scale investment in AI infrastructure has been matched by leading tech firms, including Amazon , Alphabet, and Microsoft.

Beyond Singapore, technology companies have increasingly focused on investing in Asia, with forecasts of nearly 3,000 data centers in the Asia Pacific region by 2030.

Big Tech’s Asia Focus

Asia’s vast population presents a widely untouched digital product and service market. Governments across the region have implemented policies that foster technological advancement.

Last week, Malaysia committed $250 million over the next decade to acquire chip design blueprints from Arm Holdings. The country aims to produce its own semiconductors to meet the rising demand for AI and data centers.

Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli said the Malaysian government will pay Arm for its intellectual property, including seven advanced chip design blueprints, Reuters reported .

The deal also includes training approximately 10,000 engineers in the country, according to Rafizi, who spoke to reporters.

Malaysia hopes the deal with Arm will allow domestic producers to scale up, creating 10 local chip companies with yearly revenue of $1.5 to $2 billion each, Rafizi said.

In May 2024, Microsoft announced  it was launching its first regional data center in Thailand. In September 2024, Google revealed it would invest $1 billion in Thailand to build a data center and cloud region.

In January 2025, Amazon Web Services announced  it was investing $5 billion in Thailand over 15 years.