Enabling Southeast Asia’s Empathetic AI: NSCC Singapore Supports the Growth of MERaLiON

NSCC Singapore’s high performance computing (HPC) capabilities support A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) in the development and scaling of MERaLiON, Southeast Asia’s first multimodal, empathetic large language model (LLM). The model is a flagship project under Singapore’s National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP), and was trained using compute resources from NSCC Singapore’s ASPIRE 2A+ supercomputer.

Designed to reflect the region’s diverse languages, cultures, and communication styles, MERaLiON integrates emotional intelligence, audio and paralinguistic detection, and cultural awareness to enable more human-centric AI experiences. The newly launched Version 2 expands support for regional languages such as Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, and Singlish, and introduces features like code-switching and emotion-aware speech understanding.

NSCC Singapore’s high-speed, distributed HPC environment was critical to the model’s development — enabling efficient processing of over 300TB of training data and reducing training time from several months to just 14 hours to 6 days. This significantly accelerated experimentation, iteration, and deployment.

Since its debut in December 2024, MERaLiON has seen over 90,000 downloads by startups, corporates, and academia. In March 2025, a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft was signed to explore integrating MERaLiON into Microsoft 365 and Co-Pilot. Building on this momentum, the MERaLiON Consortium was launched in May 2025, bringing together 13 key industry and research partners — including DBS, Grab, SPH Media, and the MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation — to co-develop real-world applications and scale regionally contextualised AI. NSCC Singapore was proud to be present at the launch and to join the consortium as a founding member.

Read more about the MERaLiON case study on our website here.

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