SEA-LION Roars: Local AI on Dell PCs to Transform Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE – January 12, 2026 – A landmark collaboration between AI Singapore (AISG) and Dell Technologies is set to bring hyper-local artificial intelligence directly to users across Southeast Asia, moving sophisticated language models from the cloud to personal devices. The partnership focuses on optimizing AISG's open-source SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network) large language model (LLM) to run efficiently on Dell AI PCs and edge infrastructure, a move poised to democratize access to culturally intelligent AI and reshape enterprise operations in the region.

This initiative directly confronts a major limitation of mainstream AI: a persistent Western-centric bias. By running SEA-LION locally, the collaboration promises to unlock new capabilities for millions, offering enhanced data privacy, reduced costs, and reliable offline functionality.

Bridging the Global AI Language Divide

For years, the AI landscape has been dominated by models trained predominantly on English and Western data, leaving them ill-equipped to grasp the complex linguistic and cultural tapestry of Southeast Asia. These models often fail to understand regional slang, dialects, and nuanced communication styles, creating a significant barrier to effective AI adoption. SEA-LION was created to fill this void.

Developed under Singapore's S$70 million National Multimodal Large Language Model Programme (NMLP), SEA-LION is not merely a translation layer on an existing model; it is a foundational LLM built from the ground up for the region. The model family supports 11 major Southeast Asian languages, including Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino, Burmese, Khmer, and Lao. Its training regimen is immense, leveraging a dataset of over 1 trillion tokens of high-quality, region-specific text and code. This allows it to understand cultural context that eludes other systems, from the use of "wkwkwk" to signify laughter in Indonesia to Thailand's "5555."

A key technical innovation is AI Singapore's proprietary SEABPETokenizer, which features a vocabulary of 256,000 tokens—eight times larger than that of many popular Western models. This specialized tokenizer dramatically improves the model's efficiency and comprehension of regional languages. Performance benchmarks validate its prowess; on the SEA-HELM (Southeast Asian Holistic Evaluation of Language Models) benchmark, SEA-LION models consistently rank among the top open-source models for regional tasks, in some cases outperforming much larger proprietary systems in sentiment analysis and translation.

As an open-source project with a permissive license, SEA-LION is designed to foster a collaborative ecosystem. By making the models and their training data publicly available, AISG encourages developers, researchers, and businesses across the region to contribute, innovate, and build upon a shared foundation, free from the high costs and restrictive licensing of proprietary AI.

Beyond the Cloud: The Power of Edge AI and AI PCs

The collaboration's true innovation lies in its deployment strategy: moving AI processing from distant data centers to the user's own device. Dell Technologies is leveraging its deep expertise in infrastructure optimization to test, validate, and ensure that quantised, or compressed, versions of the powerful SEA-LION models can run seamlessly on lightweight hardware like AI-enabled laptops and edge devices.

This shift to edge AI unlocks a trifecta of benefits for enterprises and individual users:

• Enhanced Privacy and Security: By processing data locally, sensitive information never has to leave the device. This is a game-changer for data-sensitive sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government, where data sovereignty and confidentiality are paramount.
• Reduced Costs and Increased Reliability: Running LLMs on-device significantly cuts down on expensive cloud computing fees and data transfer costs. Furthermore, it enables robust offline capabilities, ensuring that AI-powered applications remain functional and reliable even in areas with poor or nonexistent internet connectivity—a common reality in parts of Southeast Asia.
• Improved Performance: Executing tasks at the edge eliminates the latency associated with sending data to and from the cloud. This provides the instant, real-time responsiveness required for applications like live transcription, interactive chatbots, and other dynamic tools.

A tangible example of this potential is already being demonstrated. AISG's Voice Transcriber for Southeast Asian Languages, which integrates OpenAI's Whisper ASR system with the SEA-LION model, is being deployed on Dell AI PCs. The application provides real-time, multilingual transcription for chatbots and communication tools, operating entirely offline to guarantee speed and privacy for enterprise users.

Fueling Regional Innovation and National Strategy

This partnership extends beyond a simple technology integration; it represents a core component of Singapore's national strategy to establish itself as a leader in the global AI economy. The NMLP, which funds SEA-LION, is a government-wide effort to build sovereign AI capabilities that reflect the nation's and the region's unique multilingual and multicultural identity.

By championing an open-source, regionally-focused model, Singapore aims to foster a vibrant ecosystem of local innovation. The availability of a powerful, accessible LLM like SEA-LION empowers small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individual developers to create hyper-local AI solutions without needing the vast resources required to train a foundational model from scratch. This could spur a new wave of products and services in education, customer service, fintech, and digital health, all tailored to the specific needs of Southeast Asian markets.

"SEA-LION's transformative understanding of 11 Southeast Asian languages and cultural nuances requires practical application," said Andy Sim, vice president and managing director for Singapore at Dell Technologies. "This collaboration demonstrates that this sophisticated, culturally intelligent AI can run efficiently on laptops and edge devices. Together, we are democratising AI in Southeast Asia and are fostering a future where advanced AI is accessible to all."

Dr. Leslie Teo, senior director of AI Products at AI Singapore, echoed this sentiment, highlighting the strategic importance of edge deployment. "This collaboration is a key step in realising our vision for SEA-LION – models that are not only local and culturally relevant but also resource-efficient enough to be deployed on the edge," he stated. "By running fully featured LLMs directly on Dell devices, we provide enterprises with privacy and lower cost alternatives while remaining responsive and reliable."

The initiative also lays the groundwork for the future of AI in the region. AISG has ambitious plans to continue advancing SEA-LION, expanding its modalities to include robust audio and speech understanding to further improve its linguistic accuracy. Ultimately, this work is building a foundation to support the development of agentic AI—advanced AI agents capable of understanding context and performing complex, multi-step tasks across various sectors and languages, heralding a new era of autonomous assistance tailored for Southeast Asia.