The Google Cloud AI Asia AI technology event returned this year to Singapore, where Google Cloud, the division responsible for the development and adoption of cloud and AI technologies, introduced a number of new developments in this arena, particularly those led by the country.
Google Cloud made several exciting announcements during the event, including the Google Cloud Region data center in Singapore becoming among the first in the world to be upgraded with the latest AI technologies such as Gemini 2.5 Flash, Vertex AI Search and Notebook LM Enterprise.
Google Cloud is working with various parties from Singapore, including the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT), DBS Bank, FairPrice Group (FPG), Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore), Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) and National University of Singapore (NUS) to develop a variety of new AI systems, technologies and services that benefit the country's development.
Josephine Teo, Singapore's Minister for Digital Development and Information, said the partnership with Google Cloud is part of the Enterprise Compute Initiative (ECI) plan to enable companies in the country to develop AI technologies, services and products as quickly as possible.
One example given was Mirxes, a Singapore-based biotech startup that is developing test kits that help doctors in hospitals detect cancer cells and other diseases earlier. It is now valued at around S$1 billion and is researching and developing more new health and disease detection technologies.
Frasers Hospitality and Gill Capital have also leveraged Google Cloud's AI technologies to develop operating systems and training along with chatbots using technologies such as Imagen 4, Veo 3, Vertex AI and the latest Gemini that will not only benefit the company's employees, but also customers.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud who was also at the event, made an announcement regarding data residency or data sovereignty in the country, saying that Singaporeans' data will be stored only in the country, with AI processing power to be housed in the same location.
This means that not only will all data contained in Singapore not be exported abroad, but Singapore itself will also have the ability to process inferences on its own, whether using cloud capabilities or on-premises server equipment or through equipment not connected to any cloud services (edge devices).
This is in line with another recent announcement regarding the introduction of LLM Gemini 2.5 technology offered through the Google Distributed Cloud service, which means that companies that want to use Google Gemini services, but want their company data to be contained only in their own data center environment, GDC can be used to train their own language model systems, but retain the advantages of AI offered by Google.
Google Cloud will also expand its cloud region in Malaysia and Thailand in the future, and it is likely that functions such as data sovereignty and the ability to process inferences in the country will also be introduced when they are opened.