Temasek surpasses $400 billion as AI reshapes its portfolio

Published: 2026-07-09T08:42:29.000Z

Temasek's portfolio has crossed 400 billion dollars for the first time, and the Singaporean state investor has used the occasion to signal exactly where it thinks the next decade of returns will come from. Net portfolio value reached 518 billion Singapore dollars for the year ending 31 March, a rise of 49 billion and a second consecutive record. Total shareholder return came in at 10.5 per cent in local currency terms, or 14.8 per cent in US dollars, a respectable showing that nonetheless trailed the 17 per cent gain in MSCI's world stocks gauge over the same stretch. The strategic news matters more than the milestone. Temasek plans to lift its exposure to artificial intelligence from 6 per cent of the portfolio today to as much as 15 per cent by 2031, a shift implying at least 36 billion dollars of fresh capital. It already holds stakes in both Anthropic and OpenAI, and chief executive Dilhan Pillay described the technology's rapid advance as a pivotal phase creating vast new opportunities. Rather than chase models alone, the fund will spread money across five slices of the value chain, covering energy and data centers, semiconductors, cloud providers, foundation models, and AI applications and software infrastructure, while examining its entire book through an AI lens. There is a hedge built into all of this. Temasek is candid that its AI holdings are high-growth but volatile, so it intends to lean harder into steadier assets, raising private credit from around 2 per cent of the portfolio to 5 per cent and lifting infrastructure from roughly 1 per cent to 5 per cent. The caution is earned, since the record year was won in what Pillay called one of the most challenging environments the firm has navigated, with an uneven Chinese economy and a war in the Middle East knocking about 2 per cent off portfolio value in the final month alone. The five-year return of 4.6 per cent, dragged down by China's long slump, is a reminder that headline records can mask patchier stretches. That Middle East reference is not incidental for regional readers, since the conflict that erupted in late February left a visible dent in one of Asia's largest portfolios, a neat illustration of how Gulf geopolitics now prices into global returns. The strategic parallel runs deeper still. Temasek's playbook, using state capital to build exposure across the entire AI stack rather than betting on a single model, is precisely the approach Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and MGX have adopted through vehicles like HUMAIN and G42. As sovereign wealth funds from Singapore to Riyadh converge on the same infrastructure, chips and energy plays, they increasingly find themselves competing for the same deals.