A5X Global Innovation & Venture Summit

The event at a glance

A5X was the first Global Innovation & Venture Summit, organized by NUS Enterprise, now renamed NUSX. It ran in Singapore on 24–25 September 2026, and a related Singapore Defense Tech Hackathon continued through 27 September. The summit’s main message was that Asia’s next innovation advantage will not come from owning frontier AI alone. It will come from connecting talent, trusted data, capital, customers, institutions, and routes to global scale.

The program was organized around five “x-factors”: talent, technology, capital, impact, and traction. It was built on four intersections: AI + capital, AI + talent, AI + competitiveness, and AI + space. It covered deep tech, biotech, robotics, health, venture building, and dual-use and space technologies. The focus was on commercialization rather than research breakthroughs: taking “moonshots to market,” funding hard-tech ventures, building talent pipelines, and turning prototypes into scalable platforms.

Key themes

• • AI systems over AI models. Senior Minister of State Tan Kiat How argued that the advantage will lie in what surrounds AI: judgment, domain expertise, data, workflows, regulation, and customers. Access to a model alone will not be enough.
  • Singapore as a proving ground. Ventures can be built and tested in Singapore, win demanding early customers there, and then use the city-state as a launchpad into Asia and global markets.
  • Deep-tech scaling. Panels paired founders with investors. Participating organizations included Patsnap, Tacta Systems, Allozymes, Google X, Google Cloud, Playground Global, Granite Asia, and Matter Venture Partners.
  • Talent as infrastructure. Universities and industry would jointly build the 2035 deep-tech workforce in AI engineering, biofoundries, hardware, and quantum.
  • Strategic resilience. The space program covered orbital connectivity, Singapore’s space economy, satellite security, and protection of dual-use space assets.

The summit also marked the public transition from NUS Enterprise to NUSX. This signals a role beyond university entrepreneurship: creating global pathways for deep-tech ventures to be created and scaled.

Space and Defense session (September 25)

Overview

• Society runs on space, and that dependence makes space defense essential.
• Space is now big business, worth about $750 billion.
• Space technologies are vulnerable, and space activity has been accelerating dramatically.
• The field has shifted from government to commercial activity. Space began as a national-government initiative and is now largely commercial.
• Sovereignty has returned. According to the session notes, Trump’s actions have weakened traditional alliances. Traditional U.S. allies, notably Singapore, Europe, and Canada, have concluded that they can no longer rely on the U.S. They see a need to develop their own defense capabilities, including in space.
• Selective sovereignty is the recommended approach, a framing attributed to Accenture: control capabilities where the stakes demand it and rely on partners everywhere else.
• For Singapore, the key is getting policy right: build on its strengths, don’t try to replicate the U.S., and practice selective sovereignty while relying on partners and supply chains for the rest.

History

The session traced space development through four milestones: Germany’s V-2 rockets, Sputnik, the U.S. Moon landing, and SpaceX.

How society depends on space

Satellites have become part of the operating system of modern civilization. They do three basic jobs:

1. 1. Navigation and timing. GPS and other satellite systems do more than locate phones. Their precise timing signals keep cellular networks, financial transactions, power grids, and data networks synchronized. Location services also support air traffic, shipping, logistics, emergency dispatch, surveying, and precision farming.
   2. Communications across distance. Satellites provide broadcast, rural broadband, connectivity for aircraft and ships, payment authorization, and backup links when ground networks fail.
   3. Earth observation. Satellites support weather forecasting and disaster response before, during, and after events. NOAA reports that polar-orbiting satellites supply more than 80% of the inputs to 3-to-7-day forecast models. Earth observation also supports agriculture, forestry, water management, fisheries, and urban planning.

This dependence runs through an integrated chain: satellite, ground station, data or service provider, and finally the end user. That chain brings benefits, such as reaching remote regions and providing redundancy. It also creates vulnerabilities: interference, cyberattacks, debris, or solar activity can disrupt systems people assume are purely terrestrial.

Industry growth and commercialization

• Launches have grown from a low of 59 in 2001 to a projected 311 in 2026.
• The commercial share of space spending has risen from 15% in 1985 to nearly 80% in 2026 (estimated).
• Commercial launches have grown from 2% of all launches in 1986 to 85% in 2026.

Vulnerabilities and defense

• Debris and solar flares. Solar activity can shift satellite positions, and a collision could make an entire orbital region unusable. The U.S., Russia, and China don’t disclose where their satellites are, which raises the risk of collisions. Speakers proposed a federation that shares satellite locations. They asked whether Singapore, whose brand is trust, could serve as the honest repository for that data.
• Sabotage and weapons. China’s anti-satellite test, noted as 2007, destroyed one of its own weather satellites and left debris that contaminated about 800 km of orbital space.
• Space has been weaponized. The conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran each began with the use of space assets. Ground stations are often more vulnerable than the spacecraft themselves.

Technology shifts over the next 10–15 years

Speakers identified five transitions:

1. Cheaper, more competitive launch
2. In-space mobility, rendezvous, and servicing
3. Autonomy, AI, and digital twins
4. Advanced sensing and distributed architectures
5. Energy

Recommendations for Singapore

Singapore should build on its strengths:

• • Tech talent, such as NUS
  • Access to capital, including S$200 million in government support for space R&D
  • Its trust brand
  • Materials science and manufacturing skills; Singapore produces about 10% of the world’s semiconductors

Speakers sorted capabilities into three categories:

• • Sovereign: independent national knowledge and selective capability
  • Allied: trusted interoperability and shared awareness
  • Commercial: rapid access to frontier systems and services

The guidance was to decide which capabilities belong in each category, rather than trying to become the United States.

The Philippines in space

The Philippines has a growing but still small space capability. It is focused on Earth observation, remote sensing, ground operations, and satellite engineering. The Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA), created in 2019, focuses on disaster-risk reduction, agriculture, climate monitoring, and maritime awareness. Filipino-built satellites include:

• • Diwata-1 (2016), the country’s first microsatellite
  • Diwata-2 (2018)
  • Maya-1 (2018), its first CubeSat
  • MULA, a larger Earth-observation satellite targeted for 2027

The country has no domestic launch vehicle or spaceport and relies on international partners, mainly the U.S. Open questions raised in the session included whether the Philippines should position itself as a supplier to the industry. BAE Systems was mentioned in this context.

Bottom line

A5X was an ecosystem-building conference rather than a product launch. It positioned Singapore as a neutral, trusted platform for turning AI-enabled deep tech into investable, globally scalable ventures. The space and defense session argued that, as space becomes both indispensable and contested, Singapore should pursue selective sovereignty. That means owning what matters most, relying on allies and commercial partners for the rest, and using its reputation for trust to play roles such as steward of shared orbital data.

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