Hong Kong’s international financial centre role gives it an edge in AI market, experts say Hong Kong’s status as an international financial centre gives it an edge in artificial intelligence (AI) development in spite of rising geopolitical tensions, according to experts, as the city boosts computing power resources to support companies involved in the vital technology. “For AI companies, having easy access to capital is extremely important,” SenseTime chief financial officer Wang Zheng said in a panel discussion at the South China Morning Post’s China Conference 2025 on Tuesday. “Hong Kong has a really deep, world-class capital market.” Founded in Hong Kong in 2014, SenseTime was able to raise “a lot of private capital” in the city to support its growth before eventually going public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to Wang. “Hong Kong is really fantastic in playing the role of a capital connector,” Wang said. “I think this is the one area that Shenzhen and Singapore would be very hard-pressed to surpass in the foreseeable future.” That reflects efforts by Hong Kong’s government to reposition the city as a regional technology hub by 2035, while bolstering its role as a bridge between mainland China and the rest of the world. According to the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Development Blueprint unveiled in December 2022, the city aimed to aggressively promote tech research and development, while increasing venture-capital funding to help create a conducive environment for start-ups to flourish. Lucy Gao, co-founder of self-hosted AI coding assistant TabbyML, said that Hong Kong had helped the company gain easy access to mainland China’s AI talent pool, as well as to do business in the city’s growing AI market, where established legal and financial firms had increasingly adopted the technology. TabbyML, which offers an alternative open-source developer platform to Microsoft’s GitHub, aims to provide “whatever works best for the customer” amid “political complications” and the heightened US-China tech war. The Hong Kong government this year has doubled down on its technology push, with fresh capital investments and plans for additional computing facilities. In the city’s budget for the 2025-2026 financial year, the government set aside HK$1 billion (US$128 million) to establish the Hong Kong AI Research and Development Institute, as well as other tech-related initiatives expected to be worth billions of dollars. Hong Kong’s first AI Supercomputing Centre, operated by the government-funded incubator Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company, opened in December. It has already been 90 per cent utilised, and the second phase will be “up and running very soon, in a couple of months”, said Victor Yim, head of fintech at Cyberport. While this supercomputing facility currently uses Nvidia AI processors, Cyberport is “actively looking into other providers”, Yim said. The government last month said it planned to establish a new supercomputing centre at Sandy Ridge in the Northern Metropolis. This would support the computing requirements not only of Hong Kong, but also other parts of the Greater Bay Area, the Secretary of Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong told the Post last month on the sidelines of the VivaTech conference in Paris. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3317424/hong-kongs-international-financial-centre-role-gives-it-edge-ai-market-experts-say (ICE HONG KONG)

Fonte notizia: South China Morning Post