Singapore unlikely to draw large data centre investments

SINGAPORE: Singapore is unlikely to attract large-scale investments in data centre capacity from foreign investors, despite its recent plans to increase its capacity, says a market report by BMI Research, a Fitch Solutions company, on June 3.

This is because the allocated capacity in Singapore is not enough to meet the load requirements for data centres in South-East Asia.

Data centre investment is also growing rapidly in other markets outside Singapore, especially in Malaysia.

Singapore recently announced that it aims to provide 300 megawatts (MW) of additional capacity in the near term, with another 200MW that could be added for operators who tap green energy.

This is in a new road map, launched by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (Imda), which charts ways to develop sustainable data centres.

Responding to queries from The Business Times, an Imda spokesperson said the 300MW of additional capacity is a base to seed innovation for the industry to work together on ways to improve energy efficiencies and mobilise green energy for more capacity.

“The road map charts a pathway for the data-centre sector to innovate and pioneer solutions, not only to support Singapore’s international climate commitments, but also to help address the global challenge that countries face for data-centre growth.

“Singapore remains attractive as data centres tap its broader international position as a business and digital hub,” said the spokesperson.

A moratorium on data centres in Singapore between 2019 and 2022 prompted a rapid migration of such centres to other South-East Asian locations, in particular, Johor in Malaysia and Batam in Indonesia.

Their proximity to Singapore, their regulations, as well as the lower costs of electricity and labour have led to surging volumes of data-centre investments into these two areas.

The BMI market report estimates data centre capacity in Johor to be over 1,800MW; in Batam, it stands at 285MW.

Including previously announced permits that Singapore has awarded to Equinix, Microsoft, GDS and a consortium between AirTrunk and Byte Dance to deploy data centres, the report estimates that this will increase capacity by a maximum of 80MW, bringing the total capacity for future developments to 380MW.

With this additional allocation, the researchers behind the report have revised Singapore’s live data-centre capacity to 1,400MW, up from 876MW.

This new figure likely accounts for the multiple cloud and hyperscale data centres owned by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, which typically do not disclose their total IT loads, noted the report. — The Straits Times/ANN