Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Google are deepening their collaboration to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) adoption across education, research, and workforce readiness.
The partnership was formalised today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by NTU Provost and Deputy President, Professor Christian Wolfrum and Yossi Matias, Vice President, Google and General Manager, Google Research.
Under the agreement, NTU and Google will explore initiatives across four key areas: campus-wide AI integration, regional language and sovereign model development under AI Singapore (AISG), frontier scientific research, and advanced AI safety. The partnership will also support faculty training, and professional certification.
The collaboration builds upon NTU’s existing partnership with Google as the University empowers its students to thrive in the age of AI. Since August 2026, NTU undergraduates have full access to a suite of premium Google AI tools, such as Gemini Enterprise, Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI.
Professor Christian Wolfrum said: “Our expanded partnership with Google provides our students, faculty, and researchers with access to frontier tools and secure cloud infrastructure. Embedding AI across NTU’s curriculum and research ecosystem provides a key differentiator in how we prepare our community for an AI-enabled future. By combining Google’s technological capabilities with NTU’s academic and scientific strengths, we can co-develop impactful applications, from preserving Southeast Asian languages to discovering new scientific insights, while upholding the highest standards of safety and responsibility.”
Yossi Matias said: “Singapore isn't just adopting AI research – it is helping define how this technology serves science and society. Sustaining that momentum requires long-term investment in local talent and a deep commitment to building responsibly. Our expanded partnership with NTU brings both together, giving Singapore's researchers the resources to push scientific boundaries and turn breakthroughs into real-world impact in education and healthcare.
Advancing AI in Education
Under the new MOU, NTU and Google will expand AI enablement across teaching and research to support faculty, staff, and students. The education initiatives support NTU’s goal of embedding AI into 40 per cent of undergraduate courses by 2030.
NTU will use Google AI tools to build capabilities among its faculty and educators through structured upskilling programmes. Additionally, the University will explore integrating Gemini Enterprise with NTU Learn to turn pedagogical content into secure, searchable, and AI-accessible knowledge sources.
For example, educators could build AI assistants to guide students through course materials, or work with postgraduate researchers to turn research tasks into classroom activities. Students could use AI agents to compare evidence across papers or analyse a dataset, then explain and check the results themselves.
Professional development will be further supported by the Google AI Educator Series, offering stackable, badge-accredited training to build educator confidence and reduce administrative workload. Academic staff will also be able to attain Google for Education Certifications to validate digital literacy.
Localising AI for Southeast Asia
In partnership with AISG, NTU and Google will co-drive regional language initiatives that focus on collecting, cataloguing, and open-sourcing datasets that reflect Southeast Asian linguistic nuances, through Projects ATLAS and Amplify.
AISG will continue developing independent evaluation and benchmarking frameworks tailored to Southeast Asian cultural contexts for both frontier and open models.
Together, NTU and Google seek to develop sovereign AI models for education and healthcare that integrate Southeast Asian languages using Google’s open-weight models, such as Gemma and MedGemma.
Advancing research and safety on the cloud
To support advanced scientific discovery, NTU will design and deploy a secure research sandbox on Google Cloud Platform, developed with architectural guidance from Google.
The cloud sandbox will enable researchers to launch pre-approved environments on demand, reducing IT provisioning bottlenecks. The sandbox also provides potential access to Google's latest AI technologies, serving as a secure shared space for joint projects with external research partners. For example, a research team could use AI and data-analysis tools in a pre-approved environment to examine a vetted dataset and share selected data with an authorised external collaborator, with permissions and data separation built in.
The partnership also opens up the possibility for academic research collaboration between NTU and Google Research in APAC, alongside ongoing initiatives with Google DeepMind.
NTU researchers can also gain early access to programmes in relevant research areas, such as Google’s AI Hypothesis Generation system, which provides an accelerated channel to evaluate emerging AI capabilities for scientific discovery.
The agreement also encompasses research into AI privacy, safety, and security. Joint teams will investigate full-stack AI infrastructure protection that ensures data remains secure against future threats, focusing on post-quantum cryptography, deepfake detection, and cryptographic defences for model privacy.