SEA Daily Brief: Sea Ltd Adopts NVIDIA's Vera Rubin First in ASEAN, Grab and OpenAI Train 30,000 Gig Workers, and Malaysia's Powerwell Lands a Record Data-Centre Order

Sea Limited Becomes the First ASEAN Enterprise to Adopt NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Platform, as Vietnam's Viettel and FPT Deepen Nemotron Localization

At NVIDIA's AI Day Singapore on September 22-23 at the Raffles City Convention Centre, Sea Limited — the Singapore-founded parent of Shopee, Garena and the financial-services unit Monee — announced it will deploy NVIDIA's Vera Rubin computing platform, becoming the first enterprise in ASEAN to adopt the chipmaker's successor to its Blackwell line. Sea said the added compute will let it scale AI model development and software agents already in production: Shopee's seller-assistance tools contributed to a 14% year-on-year rise in the platform's purchase conversion rate in the first quarter, Monee's transformer-based fraud detection and credit-scoring models have lifted loan approval rates by roughly 10% while holding risk steady, and Garena has built more than 1,300 AI chatbots, workflows, agents and in-game companions across its titles. No financial terms were disclosed, and NVIDIA said Vera Rubin's first systems are being delivered in the second half of 2026.

At the same event, Vietnam's Viettel AI and FPT Smart Cloud presented separate work localizing NVIDIA's open Nemotron model family. Viettel AI has fine-tuned Nemotron 3 Super for Vietnamese-language and agentic use cases, topping both the VMLU benchmark and its own internal product benchmark, with plans to deploy it through Legal AI, an agent platform for Viettel Group staff and external customers. FPT Smart Cloud co-developed Nemotron-Personas-Vietnam, an open dataset of roughly 900,000 synthetic personas built on official Vietnamese demographic and geographic data, intended to let local developers post-train and evaluate models on Vietnamese-specific data using FPT's NVIDIA-accelerated GPU cloud.

Grab and OpenAI Launch a Two-Year Push to Train 30,000 Gig Workers and Merchants on AI Across Southeast Asia

Grab and OpenAI launched "GO Forward with AI" in Singapore on September 23, an in-person masterclass program delivered through GrabAcademy that aims to train 30,000 of Grab's driver, delivery and merchant partners on practical AI use over the next two years, with the rollout expanding to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The curriculum focuses on tasks partners can apply immediately — sales-data analysis, business planning, pricing strategy, marketing and inventory forecasting — largely built around using ChatGPT for day-to-day decisions. Each participant receives three months of free ChatGPT Plus access on completion, and OpenAI and Grab are jointly training regional instructors to scale the program across markets. The initiative builds on a partnership dating to May 2024, when OpenAI's first major Southeast Asia collaboration integrated AI into Grab's mapping and customer-support systems.

Cited research behind the launch found only about half of Grab's Singapore drivers currently use AI tools in their work, even though 87% of non-users said they would try one if given the opportunity — the gap the training program is designed to close.

Malaysia's Powerwell Lands a Record RM190.4 Million Data-Centre Switchgear Order in Johor

Powerwell Holdings Bhd's wholly-owned subsidiary announced on September 21 that it secured two purchase orders worth a combined RM190.4 million to supply low-voltage switchgear and related equipment for a data-centre project in Johor, awarded by a returning customer whose identity was not disclosed. The company called it the largest single award in its history, with contribution expected to run from the current financial year through FY28 (Powerwell's fiscal year ends March 31).

The order tops the RM158.8 million contract Powerwell announced in June 2026 for another Johor data-centre project — which it described at the time as its largest to date — meaning the company has reset its own record twice within three months. The Star flagged Powerwell among its September 22 trading-ideas roundup on the back of the news.

Eyes on the Day Ahead

Nothing regulatory is scheduled to close in the next 24-48 hours. Looking slightly further out: Thailand's SEC consultation on giving retail investors access to regulated overseas crypto derivatives through licensed intermediaries closes September 30, and Luno's second Institutional Digital Asset Conference runs in Kuala Lumpur starting September 24 with Securities Commission Malaysia, Standard Chartered and Maybank on the agenda — worth watching for any concrete update on Bank Negara Malaysia's promised end-2026 clarity on ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits.