Sourced records of Chinese AI deployments across the Global South and the Middle East

Since 2019, it decided to make Singapore its regional headquarters and implement a three-year investment plan, planning to invest billions of US dollars and hire hundreds of staff (as of Reuters' September 2020 report, it already had approximately 400 employees and 200+ open positions). The plan at the time included building a data centre in Singapore, though Reuters stated no final decision had been made. Its Singapore entity, TikTok Pte. Ltd. (UEN 201719908M, registered 17 July 2017), coordinates regional and international operations (including a US$3.8 billion data hosting investment in Thailand approved in January 2025). TikTok's CEO is based in Singapore.

In September 2020, it announced the establishment of a Southeast Asia regional hub in Singapore (compounded by geopolitical factors including India's and the United States' app bans), hosting international game publishing and cloud business, supplementing its existing offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. On 11 November 2025, it held Tencent Cloud Day Singapore, themed 'AI-Powered Global Opportunities', to promote its suite of AI-native products (the ADP agent development platform, Hunyuan 3D Global, AI Minutes, CodeBuddy, and others), positioning Singapore as an Asia-Pacific hub for AI collaboration and talent development. Tencent Cloud operates 8 technical support centres globally (whether Singapore is included is undisclosed); its 2025 regional infrastructure moves included a third data centre in Jakarta and the planned establishment of an office and data centre in Osaka.

The company operates its overseas business through two Singapore subsidiaries: Subsup Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202232608W, registered 14 September 2022, 8 Kaki Bukit Ave 4 #08-32), the developer entity for the AI companion app Talkie; and Nanonoble Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202410771D, registered 19 March 2024, 152 Beach Road #14-02 Gateway East), the operating entity for the text-to-video product Hailuo AI. In the first nine months of 2025, its AI-native products reached more than 200 countries and regions with over 212 million users; the prospectus revenue breakdown shows Singapore and the United States as its two primary overseas markets. It listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 9 January 2026, raising approximately US$619 million in actual proceeds (against a planned offering cap of US$539 million), with its share price nearly doubling on the first day of trading.

Add precise dates: Ant Group's new Singapore international-division office unveiled 28 Sep 2023 (EDB, 9 Oct 2023); Ant International spun off as an independently run unit with its own board in March 2024, HQ Singapore; Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit launched 3-4 June 2025 covering payment orchestration, onboarding, compliance checks, fraud detection and dispute resolution

In December 2023, Robobus obtained Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) T1 and M1 autonomous vehicle licences, enabling testing on public roads such as one-north and the National University of Singapore (NUS); in November 2024, the Robosweeper S6/S1 sanitation vehicles were licensed and, within a week, launched Singapore's first commercial autonomous sanitation projects on Marina Coastal Drive and at the Esplanade; it subsequently operated Southeast Asia's first fully driverless Robobus at Resorts World Sentosa, and partnered with Grab to deploy the GXR and Robobus within Grab's Ai.R autonomous driving service; WeRide is an international member — alongside Waymo — of Singapore's Autonomous Vehicle Steering Committee.

On 31 July 2024, the company signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with ComfortDelGro (the content focused primarily on China's first-tier cities, without naming Singapore); on 20 September 2025, it formally announced its entry into Singapore, partnering with ComfortDelGro to deploy on fixed routes in the Punggol area (pending regulatory approval); from 22 June 2026, the Punggol-area service has been open to public bookings via ComfortDelGro's Zig app.

Alibaba Cloud partnered with Singapore's national AI programme AI Singapore to build the regional multilingual model Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 (released November 2025) based on Tongyi Qwen3-32B: post-trained on more than 100 billion tokens of Southeast Asian language data, covering Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipino, Tamil, and other languages; it offers 4-bit/8-bit quantised versions that can run on consumer-grade laptops, is freely available via Hugging Face, and has topped the SEA-HELM leaderboard among open-source models of the same class.

Correction: headquarters relocated from Wuhan and Beijing to Singapore (mid-2025, following the Series B financing round), with the three co-founders relocating at the same time.

At the Huawei Cloud Singapore Summit on 17 July 2025 (themed 'Accelerate Intelligence, Ignite Smarter Future,' with more than 500 attendees), Huawei Cloud set three goals: helping 10 large enterprises implement multi-cloud strategies, supporting 50+ local enterprises in moving from cloud adoption to intelligent transformation, and partnering with 100+ global partners; Singapore is the only market where Huawei Cloud has deployed 5 local Availability Zones (AZs). On 27 November 2025, at the Huawei Cloud & AI Partner Summit, it formally launched the 'Huawei Cloud Singapore AI Pioneer Partner Ecosystem Alliance,' branded 'In Singapore, For Singapore,' covering sectors including public services, retail, education, fintech, and transportation.

Zhipu AI has prioritised Southeast Asia in its overseas expansion: it has established offices in Singapore and Malaysia, operates joint 'innovation centres' in Indonesia and Vietnam, and promotes localised sovereign AI agents to multiple national governments; its Hong Kong IPO prospectus confirms that the company is involved in building 'national- and city-level foundation model platforms' in Southeast Asia. In the first three quarters of 2025, revenue from private (on-premises) large-model deployments in Malaysia and Singapore was nearly RMB 18 million (approximately US$2.6 million), making these its only overseas private-deployment markets besides the United States.

Alibaba Cloud deployed its City Brain platform in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- City Brain's first expansion beyond Greater China (an agreement had already been signed with Macau in August 2017) -- with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL). Reported deployment figures are media-reported rather than company-disclosed.

MY06 is the fourth hyperscale data-centre campus announced by Bridge Data Centres (per MIDA, 2021-12-02): approximately 40 acres, 100 MW of IT load, an investment of approximately RM2.5 billion over five years, three buildings, with Phase 1 in place by end-2022. It serves as the dedicated data centre anchored by ByteDance in Johor, Malaysia.

ByteDance established its presence in Malaysia as the anchor tenant of the BDC MY06 hyperscale data center at Sedenak Tech Park in Johor (commissioned in 2022), and subsequently announced an investment of approximately RM10 billion (about US$2.1 billion) to establish an AI center in Malaysia, together with a further approximately RM1.5 billion to expand its data center. According to disclosures by the Johor Menteri Besar (Chief Minister), ByteDance's cumulative investment in AI data centers in Malaysia has exceeded RM29.5 billion, making it a core investor in Johor's AI computing cluster.

GDS launched its Nusajaya Tech Park (NTP) data-centre campus in Iskandar Puteri, Johor in August 2023. Phase 1 comprises NTP1, NTP2 and NTP3 with 22,500 sqm (242,200 sq ft) of net floor area and 69.5 MW of IT power; GDS acquired the land in July 2021 and broke ground in April 2022 (roughly 16 months to delivery, ahead of the originally planned 2024 date). GDS CEO William Huang described the campus as a catalyst for the region's journey towards a world-class AI computing hub. GDS's international business was spun off as DayOne at the start of 2025. In June 2025 DayOne signed a 21-year contract for up to 500 MW of solar power with Tenaga Nasional Berhad under Malaysia's Corporate Renewable Energy Supply Scheme (CRESS), covering Nusajaya Tech Park and Kempas Tech Park, whose combined data-centre capacity is 120 MW.

Add the precise opening date: the third data center was launched on 1 July 2025 (Alizila, 2025-07-09); the second data center in the Philippines is planned to enter service in October 2025.

On 13 August 2025, on the opening day of the ASEAN AI Summit 2025 in Kuala Lumpur, Huawei Cloud held the Huawei Cloud AI Ecosystem Summit APAC. Huawei Malaysia announced, with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in attendance, a three-year commitment to train 30,000 Malaysian AI professionals and cultivate 200 local AI partners — a forward-looking pledge, not work already delivered. Huawei Cloud additionally lists a Kuala Lumpur region code (AP-Kuala Lumpur-OP6 / my-kualalumpur-1) in its own SDK region table; no third-party source located to date confirms an operating local node.

Zhipu AI helped Malaysia build a national-level sovereign large-model MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) platform and establish the national sovereign AI talent-development laboratory Z-UM AI Lab. The platform is built on Z.ai's open-source foundation models, optimized for a multilingual environment spanning Malay, English, and Chinese as well as local culture, and adopts a sovereignty-centered data security architecture, empowering use cases in government affairs, enterprise, research, and education. It has been described as the first substantive overseas case of a Chinese company delivering a national-level sovereign large model.

Huawei Cloud operates data centres in Thailand and cooperates with the public sector: it announced in November 2020 the construction of a third Thailand data centre for approximately THB 700 million (approximately USD 23 million), with launch planned for 2021, and signed an MoU with Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES) in December 2023; work with the Thai Meteorological Department covers weather-forecasting models.

J&T Express announced in March 2025 that the DeepSeek model would be applied to sorting centres and customer service; in November 2025 it commissioned Thailand's first AI-recognition-plus-automatic-scanning-camera sorting system at the Wang Thonglang sorting centre in Bangkok (60 additional sorting lanes; sorting capacity for the same period increased by over 100% versus the original system), with plans to expand to other centres in 2026.

Huawei and Siriraj Hospital (Faculty of Medicine, Mahidol University) launched a 5G + AI smart-hospital project on 16 December 2021, implementing nine sub-projects including a 5G+AI pathology diagnosis system; verified components include a 5G portable medical kit, a 5G unmanned vehicle, a 5G medical cart, a 5G smart hospital bed, MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), and hybrid cloud.