According to a statement released earlier by the Prime Minister Office of Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will be making a visit today until the 16th of February to San Francisco and Sunnylands.
As part of the visit to San Francisco, PM will be meeting:
- Governor of California Jerry Brown
- Tesla CEO and SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk
- Apple CEO Tim Cook
- Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
- Singaporeans residing in the San Francisco Bay Area
In San Francisco too, PM will also be hosting a roundtable with Singaporean technology professionals based there, as part of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative.
The trip will conclude with a the Special ASEAN-US Leaders Summit from February 15 to 16, where US President Barack Obama and other ASEAN Leaders will be present.
Apple, Facebook and Google (part of Alphabet) respectively have physical presence in Singapore. Here’s a look at Facebook’s office in Singapore:
Google on the other hand, has shown signs of committing more technical resources in Singapore, with its latest job ads seeing developers to be based in Singapore.
“With its central location in Asia, diverse demographic, and a strong pool of technical talent, Singapore is well suited to be a key engineering hub for the Next Billion Users team,” the job ad states.
As Singapore pushes towards a Smart Nation, we definitely expect to see more tech giants setting up their headquarters here. Will something come out of PM Lee’s visit to San Francisco? Hopefully so, but one thing’s for sure, Singaporeans in the bay area can definitely get a chance to meet PM this week, albeit during the Chinese New Year.
