SINGAPORE, 9 AUG 2026 — Sixty-one years ago this country was told, more or less politely, that it would not work. No hinterland, no resources, no water of its own, and a population that did not share a language. The reasonable forecast was failure.
It is National Day again, the theme is Majulah Singapura, Go Beyond, and the parade has come home to the National Stadium for the first time in a decade. This is a technology publication rather than a patriotic one, so instead of saying the country has done well, I want to show you what we actually recorded about it this year — including the parts that are not finished.
The year, as we wrote it down
Every line there is a story we published and can stand behind. A government that tested AI agents in a sandbox and found the hard part was trust rather than capability. A regulator that wrote a governance framework for agentic systems before most countries had finished arguing about definitions. An identity system that extended passkeys to transactions that actually move money.
And the other half. GIC's twenty-year real return has come down to 3.4%, because the fund chose to take less risk — a decision, not a failure, and still a number that has to be lived with. There is a lag between building solar and connecting it that nobody is measuring. We counted 847 cyber-security alerts since 2020 and found this year setting records.
That mix is the point. A country that only publishes its wins is managing a reputation. One that makes its audit reports, parliamentary replies, and regulatory consultations public is doing something harder: governing. That public record is why we have so much to write about.
Against the odds is not a slogan here
The phrase gets worn smooth from use, so it is worth remembering what it referred to.
Water was the existential one. A country that had to buy its drinking water from a neighbour spent forty years engineering its way out of that dependency, and did it with membranes and catchment rather than with diplomacy. That is a technology story, and it became the template: face a real constraint, engineer a solution, and see it through for decades, not just a single term of office.
The same shape appears in the port, in the water-in-the-tap, in an airport built on reclaimed land, in a financial centre assembled in a place with no natural claim to one. None of it was inevitable. All of it was chosen, funded past the point where it was politically comfortable, and finished.
Which is the honest version of the encouragement. Not that Singapore succeeds because it is clever, but that it has repeatedly been willing to spend twenty years on a problem, and that habit is rarer than the cleverness.
The next constraint is already visible
If you want to know what the next twenty-year problem looks like, this year's reporting has already named it, and it is not AI capability.
It is power, land and the cost of being small in an era where the technology everyone wants is enormously physical. Data centres need electricity a small island has to import or generate; the solar that would help has a connection queue nobody is measuring; the AI labs that have arrived need both. Meanwhile the region around us is negotiating a digital economy agreement while its members legislate in different directions, and the scam economy takes real money out of real households across every border in it.
None of that is solved by a good quarter. All of it is the kind of problem this country has historically been good at: unglamorous, multi-decade, and requiring somebody to fund a thing whose benefit arrives after the next election.
And the neighbours
National days can invite insularity, so one thing needs to be said plainly.
Nothing Singapore has built works in isolation. The port is only useful because of what surrounds it. The financial centre intermediates a region, not an island. The water came from cooperation before it came from membranes. Every serious problem on this year's list — scams, digital trade rules, energy, undersea cables — is regional by construction, and cannot be solved by any one country being excellent on its own.
So: a good year to Malaysia, to Indonesia, to Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. We report on you often, sometimes critically, and we would have nothing to report if this neighbourhood were not one of the most consequential places in the world right now.
Four languages, four greetings
These are not translations of one another. Each is written in the way that language greets this country, which is the only way worth doing it.
What we are wishing for
Not another record year. A year in which the boring things keep working — the water, the port, the grid, the identity system, the courts — because every interesting thing on this island is built on top of them.
And one more decade of the habit that made the rest possible: being willing to start something that will not pay off for twenty years, and then actually finishing it.
Happy sixty-first, Singapore. We did it before. We can do it again.
