The floor told a clearer story than the panels
Walking the trade floor at SWITCH in Singapore this week, one thing registered quickly. A large share of the booths were quantum and robotics, and not just AI software sitting on top of someone else’s hardware. Actual hardware.
That was not an accident, and it was not a trade show quirk. It is the visible end of a decade of deliberate state capital allocation, and it changes how investors should read this market.
The money behind the booths
SWITCH has grown into one of Asia’s largest deep tech gatherings. The 2025 edition drew more than 25,000 attendees and 400 exhibitors from over 100 markets. This year’s edition ran from 27 to 29 October at Sands Expo.
Scale alone is not the story. The budget behind it is. In February, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong committed S$37bn to the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 plan, a 32% increase on the S$28bn that preceded it and the largest such commitment since 1991. It runs at roughly 1% of GDP, a level Singapore has held for close to two decades.
That consistency is the point. Founders here are not pricing in a funding cycle. They are pricing in a policy that has not moved in twenty years.
Quantum: an early and deliberate bet
The Prime Minister described quantum as an early and deliberate bet, and the record supports it. The National University of Singapore set up its Centre for Quantum Technologies in 2007, when most of the field was still theoretical.
That patience is now converting. Singapore will be the first country outside the United States to host Quantinuum’s Helios system, a trapped-ion machine due to complete installation by the end of this year. Sitting alongside it is a national quantum strategy of close to S$300m and a new partnership with Qolab, the superconducting hardware company co-founded by Nobel laureate John Martinis.
Wong was explicit about why those partners chose Singapore: the combination of advanced manufacturing, semiconductors and frontier quantum research in one place. Singapore is not competing on research funding alone. It is competing on the ability to fabricate what the research produces.
Robotics: customers, not just labs
Robotics follows the same pattern, and the density figure makes it concrete. Singapore runs 818 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, second in the world behind South Korea and roughly six times the global average of 132, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
For a founder building hardware, that number is not trivia. It is a customer base. Deployment density on that scale means a robotics company in Singapore can find real production environments to test in, close by, with operators who already know how to run automated lines.
That is the difference between a market with research funding and a market with demand. Founders here have conviction because they have somewhere to sell.
What we took away
Singapore is often filed as a finance hub. In frontier tech, that reading is out of date.
It is a small market that has chosen its ground carefully and stayed on it: semiconductors and advanced packaging, quantum, robotics. The state is not just writing cheques. It is building the ecosystem around them, giving companies the labs, fabs and partners to scale from here rather than leave.
Korea builds at scale. Japan perfects. Singapore is betting on what comes next, and it has been placing that bet for longer than most people realise.
Sources
- Enterprise Singapore: SWITCH 2025 concludes with record 25,000 attendees
- Prime Minister’s Office: launch of the RIE2030 plan
- EDB: Singapore invests S$37bn in RIE2030
- Quantum Computing Report: Budget 2026 and the Quantinuum Helios system
- International Federation of Robotics: World Robotics 2025 robot density
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