AI Engineer brings first Asia edition to Singapore

AI Engineer will hold its first Asia edition in Singapore, with support from companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Vercel and Z.ai.

The conference is being organised by 65Labs, a Singapore community group that says it has built a network of more than 5,000 people through meetups, workshops and hackathons over the past two years. Organisers expect more than 2,000 in-person attendees and about 50,000 online viewers.

The move brings a US conference brand to Asia as Singapore tries to strengthen its position as a regional hub for artificial intelligence talent, startups and product development. Backers and speakers for the Singapore edition include model developers, coding tool providers, and cloud and payments groups.

According to the organisers, every US edition of AI Engineer has sold out. The Singapore event will take place at The Capitol Theatre, with more than 50 speakers scheduled across three days of talks, demonstrations and workshops.

Organisers said strong local demand helped bring the event to Singapore. The volunteer-run collective began hosting local AI meetups in 2023 and says each one has exceeded venue capacity.

The group has already worked with several of the companies backing the conference. OpenAI selected 65Labs to run its first official Codex hackathon in Singapore, while Cursor used the community to host its first event in the city-state, according to the organisers.

That record points to a broader shift in Singapore's AI scene, where developer communities are becoming a way for global technology groups to reach engineers, students and mid-career workers building products or retraining for the field. Organisers say 65Labs includes founders, operators, engineers and career-switchers.

Community growth

Singapore has drawn increasing attention from AI companies because of its concentration of regional headquarters, research activity and startup funding. At the same time, community-led technical gatherings have grown in importance. In this case, the organisers present the local builder network itself as the main reason the event is expanding into Asia.

Sherry Jiang, co-founder of 65Labs, described the event as a response to demand that had outgrown smaller local formats. "We've been running meetups for hundreds in borrowed rooms. Every single time, we run out of space before we run out of people who wanted to be there. AI Engineer Singapore isn't us going to find the frontier. It's the frontier and Singapore's builders, finally being in the same room at the same time, at a scale that matches what this community has always deserved," Jiang said.

The conference will focus on technical talks, live demonstrations and workshops rather than broad industry panels, according to the organisers. Topics are expected to include agent systems, developer tooling and the production use of AI.

Sponsors listed for the event include OpenAI, Z.ai, Cursor, DeepMind, Featherless, Vercel, Cloudflare, Stripe, Reactor, Convex, Daytona and Miromind. The mix of model companies and infrastructure providers suggests the organisers are targeting working engineers and startup teams rather than a general technology audience.

Regional signal

For Singapore, the conference adds to signs that the city-state is becoming a more visible stop for international AI organisations looking to reach developers in Asia. The market is smaller than the US or China, but it offers a dense pool of English-speaking technical workers and a government-backed push into digital industries.

The organisers argue that demand is already visible in local attendance patterns. They say 65Labs has hosted the region's largest AI hackathon, involving more than 14 AI groups, and that repeated oversubscription made a larger conference necessary.

Agrim Singh, co-founder of 65Labs, said the goal was to create a more technical event for local builders. "Singapore has consistently been one of the most engaged and technically serious builder communities outside of Silicon Valley. The demand that comes out of this ecosystem: the questions people are asking, the things they are already building. This and so much more is why we wanted to bring an AI conference to Singapore that goes beyond fireside chats about the future of AI and instead, gets those at the frontier of the technology to show what's been built while running workshops to upskill attendees. AI Engineer is the right stage for that kind of conversation," Singh said.