NVIDIA chief executive officer Jensen Huang has hinted at a new supercomputer to be built in Singapore, and will be meeting Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Jacqueline Poh, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), to discuss potential “large investments” in artificial intelligence (AI) here.

“We have a supercomputer here already (and) we intend to build an even-larger one,” Huang told reporters at a media roundtable in Singapore on Wednesday (Dec 6).

Nvidia will also discuss with EDB potential investment in a “significant iconic site for AI”, said Huang. “Having access to leading edge, state-of-the-art infrastructure is essential to attain the goal of world leadership (in AI).”

Huang’s visit comes after Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong launched a refreshed national AI strategy, dubbed Nais 2.0, on Monday. The Nvidia boss said that he would also take the opportunity to meet with the local industry players, startups and researchers to talk about advancing AI in Singapore.

He noted that Nvidia has an AI technology centre in Singapore that has been working with AI researchers and startups here in the past seven years. The company will seek to work with more AI startups, as well as venture capitalists to support the AI startup ecosystem here.

One current AI initiative that Nvidia is working on with Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority is a large language model, dubbed Sea-Lion, that is tailored to South-east Asia and looks at 11 languages in the region. “It (is starting) out as a smaller model, but our goal is to make it a very sophisticated model,” said Huang.

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The Singapore market is a notable driver of US-listed Nvidia’s revenue, with a Securities and Exchange Commission filing showing that the city-state accounted for up to about 15 per cent, or US$2.7 billion, of its total revenue of US$18.1 billion for the quarter ended October.

Nvidia has two major categories of customers in Singapore, noted Huang. One is made up of cloud service providers, who are “becoming increasingly successful because of the vibrant startup ecosystem” driving up the demand for graphics processing units here. The second is companies here who deploy outside Singapore.

Another hot topic on the agenda of the roundtable was how the American technology giant is dealing with new export bans of its chips to China. Huang said: “Our plan now is to continue working with the US government to come up with a new set of products that comply with the new regulations.”

Nvidia was co-founded in 1993 by Huang, a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer.