Temasek Ditches the Coins, Rolls the Dice on AI Instead 🤖

Temasek Holdings, the $400 billion Singapore state investor, will not add new cryptocurrency exposure and will instead deepen its focus on artificial intelligence, according to a CNBC interview with Nagi Hamiyeh, president of Temasek Global Investments. The firm confirmed it holds no direct crypto positions today, a posture shaped in part by a lingering $275 million write-off from the 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange and by regulatory uncertainty in the sector.

Hamiyeh said Temasek cannot predict the role cryptocurrencies will eventually play in the broader economy. "I can't forecast what happens in the future, and the role that crypto is going to play in the main economy, depending on the different regulations that might happen." The FTX custody failures, he noted, helped harden Singapore's regulatory posture, with licensing rules tightening and compliance costs climbing in the years since. Several exchanges and fund managers reportedly revisited their Singapore operations as a result.

Temasek's latest review put its net portfolio value at S$518 billion ($400 billion) as of March, with AI accounting for roughly 6% of holdings. The firm now plans to lift that share to 15% by 2031. Hamiyeh said the AI investment cycle has just begun and will run for decades, while cautioning that some AI valuations already outpace their underlying fundamentals, a concern that has accompanied the broader AI capital rotation seen this year.

The investor is not abandoning blockchain outright, Hamiyeh added, and continues to explore how the technology could transform the real economy, though AI adoption remains the near-term priority for its investment teams. "Not every situation needs frontier models," he said, adding that success depends on companies that embrace AI and build a lasting edge. Singapore's regulatory stance toward digital currencies continues to tighten as this shift unfolds, with the move echoing similar pivots toward AI made by other institutions that have stepped back from digital assets in recent months.