NVIDIA used its AI Day Singapore event, held September 22-23, to announce a wave of AI deployment news across Southeast Asia. The standout was Sea Limited, the operator of Shopee, Garena, and Monee, becoming the first Southeast Asian enterprise to adopt NVIDIA's next-generation platform, Vera Rubin.
What Is Vera Rubin
Vera Rubin is NVIDIA's newest AI computing platform, positioned as the successor to Blackwell, with initial systems beginning to ship in the second half of 2026[2]. In its data-center configuration, the DGX Vera Rubin NVL72, the system pairs 72 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs with 36 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and connects 20.7TB of HBM4 memory over 1,400TB/s of bandwidth[3]. Nine NVLink switches let all 72 GPUs function as a single, unified compute resource, and the platform is rated at 3,600 PFLOPS of NVFP4 inference performance[3]. The design emphasizes not just model training but also serving as an execution foundation for agentic AI, where multiple AI agents operate and coordinate autonomously.
Sea Limited Becomes the First Adopter in Southeast Asia
Sea Limited, headquartered in Singapore, is a diversified technology company operating three businesses that together serve hundreds of millions of users: e-commerce platform Shopee, gaming and entertainment arm Garena, and digital financial services division Monee[1]. With this deployment, Sea becomes the first enterprise in Southeast Asia to adopt Vera Rubin[1]. Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed[2]. The company reportedly frames the investment as part of its broader push to become an AI-native organization[2].
Plans for Shopee, Garena, and Monee
At Shopee, AI tools already help sellers cut the time and effort needed to create product listings, improve product discoverability, and manage buyer communication[1]. One report indicates these efforts helped lift purchase conversion rates by 14% year-over-year in the first quarter[2]. At Monee, transformer-based AI models are applied to fraud detection and credit risk assessment; the same report states this has improved loan approval rates by roughly 10% while keeping risk levels steady[2]. At Garena, teams have reportedly built more than 1,300 AI chatbots, workflows, agents, and in-game companions to enhance the gaming experience[2]. NVIDIA has emphasized that this kind of infrastructure gives smaller businesses access to advanced computing capabilities that were previously available mainly to large corporations[1].
AI Day Singapore Reflects the Region's AI Race
Beyond Sea's Vera Rubin adoption, AI Day Singapore also highlighted Singapore public-sector bodies HTX, NCS, and ST Engineering piloting NVIDIA's open Nemotron models for public-safety and operational use cases, along with Malaysia's YTL AI Labs and Vietnam's Viettel AI fine-tuning Nemotron for their own languages[1]. As governments across the region treat AI as a matter of national strategy and move from pilots toward production, Sea's decision to invest early in next-generation compute reflects a parallel push from the private sector.
Summary
NVIDIA's Vera Rubin is the company's newest AI platform, delivering a substantial jump in compute performance and memory bandwidth over Blackwell. As the first Southeast Asian company to adopt it, Sea Limited is moving to embed AI across three very different businesses — Shopee, Garena, and Monee — and how that plays out will be worth watching as a bellwether for AI adoption across Southeast Asia.
Source [1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-day-singapore/
Source [3]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-vera-rubin-nvl72/
