Billionaire Forrest Li’s Sea becomes Southeast Asia’s first to use Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips

Singapore billionaire Forrest Li’s technology giant Sea will become Southeast Asia’s first enterprise to adopt Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin AI computing platform.

Singapore billionaire Forrest Li speaks during a fireside chat at Stripe Tour Singapore on August 2026

The investment will give the parent company of Shopee, Garena and digital financial services business Monee more computing power to develop artificial intelligence models and AI agents at scale, Sea announced on Sept. 23.

Vera Rubin combines Nvidia’s new Vera central processing unit, or CPU, with Rubin graphics processing units, or GPUs, and networking technologies designed to handle demanding AI workloads. The U.S. chip giant said at an event in Taiwan on May 31 that Vera Rubin can process AI-agent workloads at 10 times the rate of its previous-generation Grace Blackwell platform.

Sea did not disclose how many systems it plans to deploy or the value of the investment.

The move is part of the Singapore-based company’s push to become what it calls an "AI-native" business, with the technology increasingly used across its three main operations.

At Garena, employees have built more than 1,300 AI chatbots, workflows and agents, while the gaming business is developing AI companions capable of understanding and responding to players in real time.

Shopee uses AI to help sellers create product listings and improve product discovery and customer engagement. Sea said AI-generated content tools contributed to a 14% year-on-year increase in purchase conversion rates in the first quarter.

Monee, its digital financial services arm, uses AI for fraud detection and credit-risk assessment. Sea said its latest credit-risk models have increased approval rates by around 10% while maintaining a similar level of risk.

The company has been accelerating its AI investments under Li, its 48-year-old founder, chairman and CEO. In April, Sea established an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore to develop AI capabilities and create new roles in areas including AI engineering and product development.

It has also expanded partnerships with major U.S. AI companies. In June, Sea deepened its partnership with OpenAI to develop AI-powered e-commerce services across Southeast Asia and Brazil, expand access to ChatGPT for Shopee users and sellers, and promote the use of OpenAI’s Codex coding agent.

Li has increasingly positioned AI as central to Sea’s future growth.

In an October 2025 memo to employees, he said AI could help Sea eventually reach a US$1 trillion market capitalization, though doing so would require the company to "make the right calls, execute extremely well, remain very disciplined and compete relentlessly," Bloomberg reported.

Li ranked as Singapore’s 10th-richest person with a fortune of $7.7 billion on Forbes’ 2026 Singapore rich list, down from $11.2 billion a year earlier.