Sea Ltd has trimmed roughly 8 percent of Shopee's developer workforce globally, cutting hundreds of engineering roles as chief executive Forrest Li chased a US$1 trillion market-capitalisation target built on artificial intelligence. The layoffs took effect in the week of June 10, 2026, hitting app development, product and commercialisation teams, with some teams cut entirely and others reduced by 10 to 15 percent, according to people familiar with the matter.
The reason, in the telling of those close to the process, was the company's accelerating pivot to AI. Li has laid out an ambitious thesis: that AI integration across Sea's platforms, spanning e-commerce, gaming and fintech, is the vehicle that carries the Singapore-headquartered conglomerate from its current valuation to the trillion-dollar club, roughly ten times its present size. In an internal memo the previous year, he wrote that he saw a path for Sea to join that club if it could harness and ride the huge wave of value creation AI would make, calling AI the next big technology revolution with huge potential to transform the business.
The pivot has concrete form in an expanded partnership with Alphabet's Google, under which the two companies are jointly building an agentic AI shopping prototype and embedding Google's AI tools into core Shopee operations such as search and advertising. In April 2026, Sea established an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore to deepen its AI capabilities, organised around advancing foundational AI, scaling deployment and developing AI-native talent, with demand for at least 100 research, engineering and product roles expected over three years. The message to the market was unmistakable: Sea would rather outsource heavy lifting to one of the world's most advanced AI providers than maintain bloated in-house engineering teams.
A Shopee spokesperson said the company regularly assessed staffing needs and that departments made adjustments based on operational priorities, while committing to support affected colleagues through the transition. In Singapore, the Taskforce for Responsible Retrenchment and Employment Facilitation was informed of the changes, with affected employees' last working days falling between the end of June and the end of August. Sea is providing a retrenchment package in line with the Tripartite Advisory on Managing Excess Manpower, and the Creative Media and Publishing Union stationed representatives at Shopee's Geneo office and Sea's One North headquarters to support affected workers.
The cuts drew fresh scrutiny of Sea's growth-at-all-costs culture and arrived as the company's stock faced heavy pressure, having fallen about 50 percent since September 2025, when it was valued at US$116 billion, amid higher oil prices and weaker consumer sentiment. They also followed earlier rounds of retrenchment in 2022 and 2023. For an industry watching tech giants from Alibaba to Oracle reallocate capital from traditional software development toward AI, Shopee's move confirmed the pattern: leaner, AI-integrated workflows are replacing the pandemic-era hiring sprees, and even Southeast Asia's largest e-commerce platform is not exempt.