Singapore Home Team uses NVIDIA’s latest AI chips to supercharge public safety robots

SINGAPORE - A future where firefighters tackle chemical plant blazes alongside hazard-sensing robots is one step closer to reality, as Singapore’s Home Team deploys NVIDIA’s latest artificial intelligence chips to supercharge its robotic capabilities.

The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) is the first organisation in Singapore to deploy NVIDIA’s latest GB300 chip, which was commercially available in the first half of 2026.

GB300 is twice as fast as its predecessor GB200 in AI deep thinking. It also handles text, images and code much faster too.

The new GB300 chips provide massive computing power so HTX can train much smarter AI, specifically its NGINE AI infrastructure, to process text, video and audio at once and control robots at scale without fear of security being compromised.

Revealing this at the NVIDIA AI Day conference in Singapore on Sept 23, HTX’s chief AI officer Ang Chee Wee said: “As the first in Singapore to operationalise NVIDIA’s GB300, we are now able to train larger multimodal models and embodied AI models and run inference at scale.”

Multimodal AI models are able to process data from different mediums, such as text, images and audio, while embodied AI models are software that control robots.

He added: “Most importantly, the state-of-the-art sovereign AI infrastructure ensures that both our code and our data stay within our control. With NGINE, we can now operationalise AI at scale without compromising security.”

Ang said the new tools will allow Home Team officers to do more with rising public expectations on safety and security.

“At the same time, AI tools will also be used by bad actors, so the threats that we must deal with will get more complex,” he added.

Addressing the issue of job displacement, he said the goal is not to replace officers, but to have the AI robots take on the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks, such as dealing with hazardous materials and fighting fires.

The Home Team has already been using AI for a range of tasks, including facial recognition for immigration clearance at the checkpoints and drafting police reports with the help of the Report Lodging Co-Pilot (R-Cop).

AI is also being used to identify and take down scam sites that impersonate the police, government agencies and banks.

So far, use of AI has saved the Home Team close to a million man-hours annually, with this number expected to accelerate in 2027, added Ang.

In late September, HTX is also expected to establish the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre, or H2RC, to further its work in embodied AI and humanoid robotics development. Some $100 million has been committed to the centre, which will focus on developing robots to enforce public safety.

Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Tan Kiat How, who also spoke at the event, said embodied AI matters for Singapore because of the physical constraints of land, labour and energy, and its ageing workforce.

“The first wave of generative AI transformed the interface between humans and information. The next may transform the interface between intelligence and the physical world,” said Tan.

“Our opportunity is to become exceptionally good at moving technologies from possibility, to proof, to scale. We can bring frontier technology together with demanding users, researchers, engineers, regulators, capital and real-world operating environments.”

Also at the event, Singapore-based tech giant Sea announced plans to adopt NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin next-generation AI computing architecture for powering autonomous AI agents.

This is expected to pave the way to supercharge Sea’s gaming platform Garena, digital payment service Monee and e-commerce system Shopee.

This could mean reducing the time and effort by Shopee sellers to create informative product listings and improving product discovery, or improve fraud detection and credit risk assessment on Monee.

David Sun is The Straits Times’ crime correspondent. He has a background in criminology and is a licensed private investigator.