Opening Address by SMS Tan Kiat How at Tech Week Singapore

Welcome to Tech Week, and to friends from overseas – a very warm welcome to Singapore.

It's wonderful to see the crowd and energy here at TechWeek. We’ve already seen the event grow from strength to strength every year, and it’s wonderful to see familiar faces as well as new friends coming to join TechWeek here in Singapore.

It has been an eventful few weeks for technology and geopolitics.

President Trump and President Xi met in Washington last week. Artificial intelligence featured prominently in the discussions of the two world leaders.

That tells us something important. AI is no longer simply a technology story; it is an economic story, an infrastructure story, and increasingly, a strategic story.

That makes this year's theme, the Infrastructure Era, especially timely.

Over the past few years, the world has invested enormously in infrastructure for AI. GPUs. Data centres. Networks. Energy. Cloud infrastructure. All of this matters.

But as AI becomes more capable, we need to broaden our understanding of what infrastructure means.

Because having enough compute does not mean AI will be adopted. A powerful model does not mean it will work inside a hospital, bank or factory. And an AI agent capable of taking action does not mean an organisation will trust it to do so.

The next infrastructure challenge is not simply to build more. It is to build the infrastructure around AI.

The systems that enable AI to move from the model into the real world - and from experimentation to scale.

I often use an analogy. Think of traffic on the road. You have a very capable car, with a very powerful engine inside the body of the car that can get from zero to 100 in just seconds.

But if you think of infrastructure as just building more roads or more lanes on the road, that doesn't mean traffic can go smoothly. It doesn't enable the system to allow different cars and vehicles on the road to get from point A to point B safely and seamlessly, while ensuring that people can trust the whole system.