Amazon said on Tuesday it would invest US$9 billion in Singapore over the next four years to expand its cloud computing capabilities in the city.

The announcement comes after fellow tech titan Microsoft unveiled billions of dollars of investment in the same sectors in Southeast Asia last week as firms look to take advantage of growing demand in the region.

Amazon said the figure doubles its investment in the city-state and will help it meet growing demand for cloud services and adopt artificial intelligence.

“AWS (Amazon Web Services) is doubling down on its cloud infrastructure investments in Singapore from 2024 to 2028 to support customer demand, and help reinforce Singapore’s status as an attractive regional innovation launchpad…,” Priscilla Chong, Country Manager of Singapore for AWS, said.

Amazon said its investment will support some 12,000 jobs in Singaporean businesses each year.

It is also partnering with the Singapore government to help local businesses accelerate the adoption of AI.

The e-commerce titan last week said profit in the first three months of 2024 tripled as its cloud, ads, and retail businesses thrived.

The company founded by Jeff Bezos is also testing an AI chatbot named Rufus that provides shopping tips to US mobile app customers.

Meanwhile, generative AI features for sellers help them create product listings.

The company also plans to invest billions of dollars in AWS datacenters in Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States in coming years, according to the earnings release last week.

Tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft have been investing more in Southeast Asia recently.

Microsoft pledged US$2.2 billion in artificial intelligence and cloud computing investment in Malaysia on Thursday.

That announcement came after tech chief Satya Nadella unveiled a US$1.7 bn investment in Indonesia, as well as Thailand’s first data centre region.

The tiny but wealthy and infrastructure-rich Singapore has become a business and technology centre in Southeast Asia, further solidifying its status after the pandemic. 

Pakistan’s consumer price inflation has come down to 17.3 per cent in April, the lowest during the preceding two years, data from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) says. 

Pakistan has been beset by inflation above 20pc since May 2022, registering as high as 38pc in May 2023, as it has gone through reforms as part of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout programme. 

Month-on-month inflation is down 0.4pc, showing negative growth for the first time since June 2023. 

The Finance Ministry in its monthly economic report said it expected inflation to hover between 18.5pc and 19.5pc in April and ease further in May to 17.5pc-18.5pc. 

“The inflation trajectory is slowing primarily on account of food inflation which has slowed down considerably,” said Faizan Kamran, chief executive of a Karachi-based investment and research company.

Kamran added that he expected inflation to fall into single digits in the next five to six months. 

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) maintained its key interest rate unchanged at 22pc for the seventh straight policy meeting on Monday, hours before the donor agency executive board approved $1.1 billion in funding under a $3 billion standby arrangement signed last year. 

Pakistan receives last tranche from IMF 

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) received SDR 828 million (around $1.1 billion) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday – a day after the Fund approved the last tranche for Pakistan under the $3 billion Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). 

In a statement, the SBP said the amount would reflect in the foreign exchange reserves for the week ending on May 3. 

Last week, the SBP said its foreign exchange reserves dropped by $74 million to $7.981 billion (in the week ending on April 19) because of external debt repayments.

IMF greenlights $1.1bn tranche 

On Monday, the IMF approved disbursement of $1.1 billion tranche, concluding the second bailout package in eight years. The board met in Washington and completed the second review. It is learnt that all board members, except India, favoured the last installment for Pakistan.

The Czech Republic’s central bank on Thursday cut its key interest rate for the fourth straight time as inflation dropped and the economy showed signs of recovery.

The cut by a half-percentage point brought the interest rate down to 5.25%. The move was expected by analysts.

The bank started to trim borrowing costs by a quarter-point on Dec. 21, which marked the first cut since June 22, 2022. It continued with a cut by a half-percentage point on Feb. 8 and went on by another half-percentage cut on March 20.

Inflation declined to 10.7% in 2023 from 15.1% in 2022, according to the Czech Statistics Office, and dropped to 2.0% year-on-year in February, which equals the bank’s target, and remained unchanged at the same level in March.

The Czech economy was up by 0.4% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024, and increased by 0.5% compared with the last three months of the previous year, the preliminary figures released by Statistics Office indicated on Tuesday.

That came after the Czech economy contracted by 0.2% in the last three months of 2023 compared with a year earlier.

The Czech bank’s decision comes as central banks around the world, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, are trying to judge whether toxic inflation has been tamed to the point that they can start cutting rates.

The European Central Bank left its key rate benchmarks unchanged at a record high of 4% in April, but signaled it could cut interest rates at its next meeting in June.

But the U.S. Federal Reserve emphasized earlier this week that inflation has remained stubbornly high in recent months and said it doesn’t plan to cut interest rates until it has “greater confidence” that price increases are slowing sustainably to its 2% target.