GitHub clocks record 1.7m users in SG as AI reshapes coding

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Singapore’s developer community on GitHub has reached 1.7 million users, growing 35% year over year from 28% in 2024. Around 464,000 new users joined in the last 12 months alone, according to the company.

This is the highest growth rate that GitHub, which was acquired by US tech titan Microsoft in 2018, has logged in the city-state so far.

Indonesia’s trajectory is even more striking, skyrocketing from 900,000 developers on GitHub in 2020 to 4.37 million currently. The country is now home to the eighth-largest developer community globally.

That number will reach 8.7 million by 2030, as per GitHub’s estimates. Sharryn Napier, the company’s vice president for Asia Pacific, tells Tech in Asia that AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot is driving the growth. The program has lowered the barriers to entry for developers, especially for those who are not fluent in English.

Out of 180 million registered GitHub users, over 26 million are using GitHub Copilot globally, according to Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings report published in October 2025.

GitHub says 80% of new users used Copilot in their first week on the platform. However, the company didn’t provide specific numbers per region.

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Napier says enterprise adoption is picking up across Southeast Asia, with companies like Singapore Airlines and Indonesia’s GoTo Group deploying Copilot.

While she did not share specific metrics from these implementations, Napier points to Cathay Pacific as an example. The Hong Kong-based airline reduced its mean time to repair – the average time needed to fix a system or tool after failure – by 63%. It also cut down tech debt by 40% within 12 months of migrating to GitHub’s platform and using its AI tools.

Beyond decreasing tech debt, common use cases among enterprise clients include refactoring and modernizing their legacy systems, Napier shares.