❯ OpenAI and Anthropic expansion pushes up Singapore office rents, with OpenAI eyeing five floors of Shaw Tower

rent pressureAI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic are putting pressure on Singapore office rents as they expand, driven directly by the Singapore government’s courtship, the Financial Times reported on September 20. It is the first time AI expansion has surfaced in reporting as upward pressure on a city’s office rents.

the footprintsOn floor area: OpenAI is in talks to lease roughly 100,000 sq ft across five floors of the newly completed Shaw Tower on Beach Road, about a quarter of the building’s office space. That follows its May announcement that Singapore would host its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States, backed by a S$300 million investment and more than 200 specialist hires over the coming years. Anthropic has taken about 100 desks at Ocean Financial Centre in Collyer Quay and opens its Singapore office in October, its fifth in Asia-Pacific. Both have also been hunting for expansion space in Dublin.

spilloverWhat this surfaces is the local spillover cost of AI expansion. For two years those costs showed up mainly in electricity prices and data center land; now office rent joins the list — and this one lands directly on other companies in the same city. What to watch is whether Singapore balances investment promotion against local rents, and whether other Asia-Pacific cities courting the same firms end up replicating the trade.

▪ SIGNALThe compute bill lands on the grid, the talent bill lands on office towers — the cost of AI expansion is being spread onto cities.