Southeast Asia is teaching AI to speak its own languages

At NVIDIA's AI Day in Singapore, the spotlight was not on Silicon Valley but on Southeast Asia. Public-sector AI deployments are spreading across the region — smart cities, airports — while AI Singapore is folding NVIDIA's Nemotron models into SEA-LION, the region's own family of language models. Vietnam's Viettel AI and FPT are fine-tuning Vietnamese-language models, and Sea Limited — the company behind Shopee, Garena and Monee — became the first ASEAN enterprise to adopt NVIDIA's new Vera Rubin platform. The AI future is being written in Southeast Asian languages, by Southeast Asian builders.