OpenAI Plans 50–70 Staff Expansion in Singapore to Support Growing ChatGPT Demand and AI Innovation

OpenAI Makes Singapore a Key Hub for AI Expansion with Custom Solutions and Major Partnerships

OpenAI is staking a strong claim in Singapore as part of its global drive to become a dominant technology player.

Since setting up its Asia-Pacific base in November 2024, the San Francisco-based AI firm plans to grow its team to 50–70 employees by the end of December, focusing heavily on sales and market expansion.

While the company did not disclose its current headcount, it has already signed notable clients including Singapore Airlines, Grab, Sea Group, and the Singapore Tourism Board.

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Why Singapore Is at the Centre of OpenAI’s Asia-Pacific Strategy

Singapore’s large ChatGPT user base, tech-friendly companies, and supportive government made the republic an attractive choice, said Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

He added,

“Asia-Pacific is one of our fastest-growing regions in general – it’s about four times in growth year-on-year.”

OpenAI reports that Singapore ranks among its top three markets globally for per-capita adoption, with roughly one in four residents using ChatGPT.

How OpenAI Competes While Partnering with Microsoft

The company is approaching organisations directly, offering multi-modal AI features, customisation, access to its latest models, and enterprise software.

Kwon highlighted about the focus,

“It’s not so much about the models as much as the product that we build around it, the experience around it. So, while users might have access to the same underlying models (using others’ software), we think we do a pretty good job of putting it into a product experience that makes the most out of those capabilities.”

Despite its partnership with Microsoft, which invested around US$13 billion in OpenAI at the time ChatGPT went public in November 2022, the company is now renegotiating terms while competing for local clients.

Philbert Gomez, executive director at the Economic Development Board, said the presence of OpenAI in Singapore offers significant opportunities for local workers, start-ups, and tech firms.

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Custom AI Solutions Drive Client Confidence

Telco Circles exemplifies OpenAI’s tailored approach.

Vice-president of product and AI innovation Gaurav Tandon explained that rather than layering AI onto existing systems, he chose to start “a joint road map from scratch with OpenAI, incorporating its upcoming features and language models.”

The goal is to deliver personalised services, such as analysing travel behaviour to generate custom roaming plans and tailored offers for flights, hotels, and activities.

Tandon added:

“OpenAI has been willing to build with us rather than offer us off-the-shelf capabilities, which gives us a lot of confidence in working together with them.”

Singapore Airlines became OpenAI’s first airline client in April, planning to integrate multi-modal prompts across text, audio, diagrams, and video into customer service, operations, and office workflows.

The airline emphasised early and customised access to the company’s AI research and engineering teams as the reason for choosing OpenAI.

Investing Despite Losses Signals Long-Term Ambition

OpenAI has recently secured high-profile deals with Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD to expand capabilities from data centres to enterprise software, a strategy valued at roughly US$1 trillion based on projected growth.

The firm posted operating losses of US$7.8 billion and burned through US$2.5 billion in cash in the first half of this year.

Kwon said:

“We are mostly not profitable because we continue to invest our revenue into building more compute, doing more research and developing products. From a gross margin perspective, we actually are profitable in most markets.”

How OpenAI Plans to Support Explosive ChatGPT Demand

With over 800 million weekly users and more than four million software developers leveraging its platform, OpenAI sees Singapore as a strategic hub for both consumer and enterprise markets.

Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer, noted:

“We’ve got 700-million plus weekly active users of ChatGPT, and serving data, serving AI at that scale requires data infrastructure investment at an equal scale. We’re going to continue to invest behind growth and demand, and if that brings us here to Singapore or anywhere else, we’re very open to it.”

The Singapore office is emerging as a central pillar in OpenAI’s global expansion, driving customised AI solutions, high-profile partnerships, and long-term infrastructure investments to support the ever-growing ChatGPT ecosystem.