The most read Vietnamese newspaper
Edition: International | Vietnamese
© Copyright 1997 VnExpress.net. All rights reserved.
Get VnExpress first in Google Search
See more of the news you trust. Make VnExpress a preferred source to prioritise our updates in your Google search results
Li outlined the strategy during Sea's third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, saying its new venture, Sea Cloud, aims to help businesses adopt AI while generating revenue from technology developed for Sea's existing operations.
Rather than building extensive data center infrastructure, Sea plans to rely primarily on partners and customer prepayments to finance computing equipment. It will pursue projects requiring dedicated computing capacity only when customers make firm commitments and the expected returns justify the investment.
"We see this as an opportunity to turn our AI capabilities from a cost center into a profit center for Sea," Li said, as quoted by The Business Times.
 |
|
Singaporean billionaire Forrest Li speaks at a fireside chat during Stripe Tour Singapore in August 2026. Photo courtesy of Stripe/YouTube |
The company aims to commercialize AI technology already used across its operations, including fraud detection, customer service and content generation.
Li said improvements in AI models and declining costs of using them were creating opportunities for wider business adoption. By offering its technology to external customers, Sea could generate additional revenue while spreading its existing infrastructure costs across a larger user base.
Sea Cloud was first announced last month, when Li said in an internal memo that around 500 employees had spent two years rebuilding the company's cloud platform to support AI applications.
Li, 48, ranked 10th on Forbes' 2026 list of Singapore's richest people, released in September, with an estimated fortune of $7.7 billion. He founded Sea's predecessor, online gaming company Garena, in 2009 before expanding into e-commerce through Shopee and digital financial services through Monee.
Sea's cloud expansion follows Li's earlier ambition to use AI to drive the company's next phase of growth. In October 2025, he suggested that advances in the technology could eventually help Sea reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion.
In September this year, Sea announced it would become the first company in Southeast Asia to adopt U.S. chip giant Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin AI computing platform, giving it greater computing power to develop AI models and applications.
