This press release was jointly issued by Google and the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI).
Google and the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) today announced an expansion of its long-standing collaboration with the Singapore Government through a new National AI Partnership. This partnership aims to harness frontier AI as a force for good – including deploying AI to solve society's challenges, fostering an AI-ready workforce in Singapore, driving enterprise innovation, and creating a secure ecosystem. It also seeks to advance Singapore’s National AI Strategy to deploy AI at scale for economic growth and public good.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is led by MDDI, and builds on the success of a 2022 MOU with the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group – the first public-private AI partnership to enhance AI innovation in Singapore.
Solving societal challenges across health and life sciences
A key area of this partnership is accelerating Singapore’s research and development efforts, bolstered by Google DeepMind presence in Singapore and a part of its global National Partnerships for AI initiative. These efforts will focus on empowering public agencies and researchers to deploy frontier AI models on high-impact areas, starting with health and life sciences. This includes:
- Augmenting care with AI Co-clinicians. In healthcare, Google DeepMind is exploring a collaboration with public health clusters as part of its global AI co-clinician research initiative. It explores how AI can amplify a doctor’s expertise to deliver higher quality care. It also looks into the evolution of healthcare to “triadic care,” where AI agents support patients throughout their care journeys under the clinical authority of their physician, with systems that can provide more precise information sourced from clinical guidelines and scientific literature.
- Accelerating scientific discovery: To further accelerate scientific discovery, Google DeepMind is partnering with the National Research Foundation (NRF) to train local researchers on agentic AI tools for science. Tools like Co-Scientist, are already showing promise across a range of biomedical applications. Google DeepMind will also host workshops to help the local scientific community use these frontier tools to unlock new breakthroughs.
In tandem, Google and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) will collaborate to accelerate the translation of lab discoveries into high-value innovations across materials and life sciences. A*STAR plans to equip its researchers and staff with secure, AI-enabled tools on Google Cloud, including hypothesis generation capabilities to support scientific research and analysis. By enabling researchers to draw insights from scientific datasets within a governed environment, the collaboration will help strengthen A*STAR’s ability to advance discoveries responsibly while safeguarding intellectual property.
- Inclusive Innovation: Google DeepMind is developing a Gemma-powered running assistant designed for blind and low vision athletes. By using spatial reasoning that provides real-time environmental understanding, this tool helps the athletes run independently without physical lines or human guides. Google DeepMind is also partnering with SG Enable— Singapore’s focal agency for disability and inclusion—to test and iterate the product so it meets the real-world needs of vision-impaired runners.
Enhancing education and building a future-ready workforce
To ensure that AI benefits everyone, Google is partnering with the Government to build a future-ready education ecosystem.
The foundation is already in place. Google has enabled advanced AI functionalities within Google Workspace for Education for all educators from primary schools to junior colleges. This provides teachers with secure, AI-powered assistance like planning lessons and tailoring course material, giving them more time to focus on teaching and mentoring students.
Building on this foundation, the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Google are expanding their collaboration to strengthen MOE’s AI capabilities across teaching and learning, including educator training and upskilling programmes. These efforts are part of MOE’s broader approach to evaluate how enterprise solutions can be applied effectively and scaled in support of education outcomes.
Google will also continue to build on its programmes under the ‘Majulah AI’ initiative to empower every segment of the population in Singapore – including the flagship Skills Ignition SG initiative with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)1 for jobseekers, Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First and AI Cloud Takeoff for startups, entrepreneurs and developers, as well as Gemini Academy for every Singaporean, including our seniors.
Driving Innovations for Growth
Google will support efforts to drive innovations for growth for enterprises and the local startup ecosystem. Following the launch of its Singapore Engineering Center, Google Cloud’s expanded team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) will help Singapore-based companies further accelerate and scale agentic enterprise transformation.
The new National AI Partnership also builds on Google Cloud’s ongoing work with the likes of AI Singapore (AISG), the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT), the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore), the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX), and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Creating a secure and trusted ecosystem
This National AI Partnership also supports Singapore’s ambition as a global AI hub for trust technologies, developing the safety frameworks and tools necessary for the responsible deployment of AI.
As agentic systems open new possibilities, Singapore is testing how AI agents – specifically “computer use2” agents – work in real-world settings to understand their behaviour, potential value and risks, and how governance frameworks may need to evolve to enable their use. A joint whitepaper by Google, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore), and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) discusses findings and recommendations from their AI Agents Sandbox. These includethe best practices necessary for these agents to safely and efficiently perform tasks like software testing and social assistance application.
Additionally, Google DeepMind is collaborating with IMDA and MLCommons to research multimodal and multilingual safety benchmarks. This collaboration is focused on supporting the safe and responsible deployment of AI that respects the nuance of local languages and cultures, helping to ensure that the digital future we build is one that is designed for and with everyone.
