OpenAI in Talks for Shaw Tower; Anthropic Opens Singapore Oct

OpenAI is in talks to lease about 100,000 sq ft across five floors of the newly completed Shaw Tower on Beach Road, roughly a quarter of the building's office space, the Financial Times reports. It currently occupies about 100 desks at The Work Project's CapitaSpring facility.

The scale-up follows a May announcement in which OpenAI said Singapore would host its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States and that it would "hire more than 200 specialised artificial intelligence professionals over the next few years" as part of a S$300 million investment. Shaw Tower, a 32-storey building with 435,000 sq ft of office space, only received its Temporary Occupation Permit in mid-June.

Anthropic is not far behind. It will open its Singapore office in October, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific after Tokyo, Bengaluru, Seoul and Sydney, and has taken about 100 desks at The Executive Centre inside Ocean Financial Centre in Collyer Quay, Fortune reported. Dale Finlay, Anthropic's general manager for ASEAN, will oversee the local operation.

The pull is concrete on Anthropic's side too. Its own Economic Index ranks Singapore second among 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to population, with usage 5.81 times higher than population size alone would predict. Both companies are hiring locally across sales, applied AI, research and marketing roles.

The Singapore build-out lands amid a run of dense coverage of both firms in our tracker, including a recent FT investigation into how the wider AI industry finances its infrastructure spending.