Singapore Lost 10,000+ Jobs Across 12 Industries in 2026: Shopee Cut Developers, Ubisoft Cut 70, and Anthropic Is Opening an Office There. Here Is Why Dubai Employers Should Move Now.

Something unusual is happening in Singapore’s labour market, and it matters more to a Dubai employer than most regional headlines do. Twelve industries across the city-state have shed over 10,000 jobs in 2026, the IT sector is contracting for the second straight year, and companies like Shopee are explicitly saying AI replaced the roles they cut. At the same time, AI jobs in Singapore pay up to S$350,000, and Anthropic is opening a Singapore office this month. The talent pool is splitting in two: engineers who built at scale for the last decade are being displaced, while a narrow slice of AI specialists commands record salaries. For UAE employers with capital and open headcount, that split is a hiring window.

The Numbers: 10,000+ Jobs, 12 Industries, One City-State

According to Vulcan Post’s tracking, Singapore has lost over 10,000 jobs across 12 industries in 2026. The information technology sector, which added thousands of roles annually through the pandemic boom, is now in sustained contraction: 3,700 jobs lost in 2025, another 1,700 in 2026. The Information sector as a whole fell 18 percentage points in hiring intent compared to last year, according to the latest MOM Manpower Survey for Q4 2026.

The layoffs are not theoretical. Shopee, the Sea Group subsidiary and Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform, cut hundreds of software developer roles in Singapore, explicitly stating that AI had made those positions redundant. Ubisoft announced 70 job cuts in Singapore as part of a return-to-profitability restructuring. CapitaLand Investment retrenched roughly 90 employees. These are not startups running out of runway; these are established, profitable companies making structural decisions about headcount.

Globally, the picture is consistent. TrueUp’s layoff tracker records 196,245 people impacted across 662 tech companies in 2026. The pattern is the same everywhere: traditional roles are being compressed while AI-adjacent roles expand.

The Paradox: Jobs Vanish, Vacancies Stay Unfilled, AI Salaries Surge

Here is the number that makes this story strange: 4,000 IT vacancies in Singapore remain unfilled despite the layoffs. That is not a contradiction. It is a skill mismatch made visible. The roles being cut (infrastructure administrators, manual QA engineers, routine maintenance developers) are not the roles being hired for. The roles being hired for (AI engineers, ML infrastructure specialists, prompt engineers, agentic-system architects) require capabilities the displaced workers largely do not have.

The salary data makes the split vivid. According to Vulcan Post, AI jobs in Singapore now pay up to S$350,000 per year (approximately AED 960,000). Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance and Trip.com have all stepped up campus hiring at NTU and NUS in 2026. Anthropic announced it is opening a Singapore office in October 2026 and hiring across multiple roles. The AI economy is booming; the traditional tech economy is shrinking. Same country, same industry label, completely different labour markets.

For Dubai employers, this paradox is an opportunity. The engineers being displaced from Shopee or Ubisoft are not junior hires. They are professionals with 5-15 years of experience building distributed systems, mobile applications and e-commerce platforms at scale. They may not have “AI engineer” on their CV, but they have the systems thinking, production operations experience and architectural judgement that AI-native teams desperately need. The market has mispriced them, and the mispricing will not last.

UAE Capital Is Ready: $727M in Q3, Startup Funding Up 15%

The demand side of the equation is equally clear. According to DXB Start’s Q3 2026 tracker, UAE startups raised $727 million across 31 funding rounds in Q3 2026, with $8 million across 2 rounds already in Q4. The tracker reports a 15% year-over-year increase in total startup funding. That capital needs to go somewhere, and the largest expense for any technology company is engineering talent.

The UAE tech sector has so far avoided the systemic layoffs seen in Singapore, the US and Europe. Gulf News reported that UAE companies continue hiring, launching new startups and winning contracts. This creates an asymmetry: capital-rich companies in the UAE are competing for talent in a market where supply has just increased dramatically due to global displacement.

Global Context: 196,245 Displaced and Counting

Singapore is not an isolated case. The global tech layoff tracker shows 196,245 workers impacted across 662 companies in 2026. Meta, Snap, Microsoft and Oracle are among the largest contributors. Oracle alone is reported by analysts to be considering 20,000-30,000 additional cuts tied to its $55.7 billion AI infrastructure CapEx, according to TD Cowen analysis. These are not recession layoffs, they are reallocation layoffs. Companies are cutting traditional engineering roles to fund AI infrastructure and AI talent.

For a Dubai employer, this is the macro context: a global pool of experienced engineers, many of whom built the systems that these companies now want to automate, are available for the first time since 2022. The engineers are experienced, they are motivated to relocate (Singapore’s tightening EP framework and the US visa uncertainty both push towards the UAE), and they will not stay available long.

What This Means for You: 5 Actions for Dubai Employers

1. Source from Singapore immediately. Reach out to engineers at Shopee, Sea Group, Grab and Ubisoft Singapore. Many are on notice periods or garden leave right now. The ADGM employment guide covers the visa and onboarding process.
2. Rewrite job descriptions to target displaced generalists. Stop requiring “3+ years AI/ML experience.” Instead, require “5+ years production systems at scale” and offer 90 days of AI upskilling. You will get better engineers at lower cost.
3. Use the Golden Visa as a closing tool. Singapore’s COMPASS framework has made EP visas harder to obtain. Dubai’s Golden Visa for skilled professionals is a concrete advantage. Lead with it in your offer letter.
4. Budget for relocation, not signing bonuses. An engineer moving from Singapore to Dubai cares more about housing, school enrollment and visa processing speed than a cash bonus. Cover the friction, not the ego.
5. Move before Anthropic and Google absorb the pool. Anthropic is opening its Singapore office this month. Google, ByteDance, Huawei and Alibaba are all hiring aggressively on NTU and NUS campuses. The supply of experienced engineers is finite and the demand from AI labs is infinite. Your window is Q4 2026.

What Happens Next: Our Predictions for Q1 2027

Singapore’s contraction accelerates. The MOM manpower survey shows Information hiring intent dropping 18 points year-over-year. That trajectory does not reverse in one quarter. Expect another 1,000-2,000 IT job losses in Q1 2027, concentrated in roles that AI can partially or fully replace.

AI salaries plateau in Singapore, surge in the Gulf. As supply catches up to demand in Singapore’s AI sector (Anthropic, Google and others are training fast), salary inflation slows there. In the UAE, where the AI talent base is thinner and the capital flow is growing, salaries for AI-capable engineers rise through Q1 2027.

The relocation corridor from Singapore to Dubai becomes a recognised pipeline. We are already seeing 3x the inbound enquiries from Singapore-based engineers compared to this time last year. By Q2 2027, “Singapore to Dubai” will be as established a talent corridor as “Bay Area to Dubai” became in 2023.

FAQ: Singapore Layoffs and Dubai Hiring