AI Engineer Singapore — the first Asia edition of the AI Engineer Summit series curated by swyx (Shawn Wang) of Latent Space — ran 15–17 May 2026 at The Capitol Theatre in the City Hall district. Around 2,000 builders attended in person and roughly 50,000 followed the livestream; all booths and conference passes sold out before the event. The conference was organised by 65Labs, a Singapore community group that grew out of two years of meetups and hackathons, pulled together in under three months with veteran organiser Ben Dunphy.
Headline sponsors included OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Z.ai, Vercel, Cloudflare, Stripe, Featherless, Convex, Daytona, Reactor, and Miromind — each sent a speaker rather than buying a pitch slot. The lineup featured Tibo Sottiaux (OpenAI, Codex lead), Bill Dally (NVIDIA chief scientist, on efficient AI), Sanjay Gupta (Google APAC president, on autonomous AI in enterprise), and a closing keynote from swyx framing the event as "AIE Singapore: The Agentic Nation." Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan delivered the 16 May keynote, and Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo also spoke.
Format was three days, hybrid, practitioner-only — no keynote theatre, no vendor pitches. Friday ran workshops plus a Leadership Track for CTOs, VPs of AI, and founders; Saturday and Sunday split across four parallel tracks: Software, Design, Physical AI / Robotics, and Infrastructure. The AI Engineer franchise has scaled from one event a year in 2023–24 to four in 2025 and seven globally in 2026.
For Singapore enterprise tech, the conference pulled frontier labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Cursor, Z.ai) onto Singapore soil and paired them with cabinet-level government endorsement — signalling that Singapore is now treated as the default APAC base for agentic-AI engineering, not just AI policy. For SG buyers, that shortens the path from "what is shipping in San Francisco" to local procurement by months.
