Red Hat has opened an Asia Pacific AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore, backed by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), to help organisations move artificial intelligence (AI) from experimentation into production using the company’s open source technologies and engineering expertise.

The Centre’s engineering teams will pursue two complementary paths: developing reusable software architectures for common industry challenges, and contributing code directly to upstream open source projects to address enterprise needs in deployment, runtime optimisation and platform management.

DSTA to co-engineer defence AI applications

To tap the CoE’s capabilities, Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) is collaborating with Red Hat to co-develop AI and cloud-native solutions that DSTA can apply to defence applications, spanning AI, cloud computing, application modernisation and edge computing, including joint DevSecOps and “Day 2” operations practices across on-premise and off-premise environments.

“DSTA continually explores new approaches to strengthen the capabilities we deliver for Singapore’s defence. Through our collaboration with Red Hat under the AI Centre of Excellence, we look forward to co-engineering and scaling AI and cloud-native solutions relevant to our technology needs for cloud and on-premise environments,” said Gayle Chan, deputy chief executive (information) at DSTA.

Centre aims to build local AI talent

The CoE includes a dedicated innovation team of engineers, forward-deployed engineers, architects and project managers focused on AI and machine learning deployments, and will support skills development in software engineering, automation, cloud-native development and DevSecOps for customers and partners in the region.

“AI adoption is moving rapidly from experimentation towards execution, and organisations need open platforms and hands-on engineering expertise to make that transition responsibly. EDB’s support enables us to grow the Centre here, while our co-engineering with DSTA demonstrates how it can be applied to complex, real-world use cases,” said Daniel Aw, vice-president and general manager of Red Hat Asia Pacific.

Yueh Chinn Seah, vice-president at Digital Industry Singapore, said the CoE “deepens Singapore’s capabilities in open source enterprise AI” and creates opportunities for local talent to build engineering skills as the company looks to scale AI solutions across Southeast Asia.

MAS and Singtel honoured for open source deployments

Red Hat separately recognised the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Singtel at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 – Singapore for their use of open source technologies to address business challenges.

• MAS modernised its MEPS+ financial infrastructure to strengthen reliability and business continuity.
• Singtel established a unified platform to scale AI deployment, improving resource efficiency and cutting cluster creation time from weeks to less than a day.