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Data Centres: Boom and Backlash
8SEP

Singapore splits 200 MW four ways

2 min read
13:06UTC

Singapore picked four proposals from twenty on 21 August, giving Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel Data Centres and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres 50 MW each.

IndustryDeveloping
Key takeaway

Singapore's four winners hold provisional 50 MW allocations, with Digital Realty's tied to more than 50% green power.

Four proposals were selected from twenty by Singapore's Economic Development Board and the Infocomm Media Development Authority on 21 August, under the country's second Data Centre Call for Application 1. Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel Data Centres and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres each hold a provisional allocation of 50 MW, 200 MW in total, and the agencies will decide within 18 to 24 months whether to run a third call.

Singapore hands out data-centre capacity through competitive calls rather than granting it to whoever applies, which is why twenty proposals were chasing a fixed pool. A provisional allocation is a right to build up to a stated load, not a commissioned hall, and none of the 200 MW is running.

Digital Realty then published detail the joint announcement omitted. Its 50 MW sits at Jurong Island's low-carbon data centre park, conditioned on sourcing more than 50% of that capacity through green power pathways and on meeting the authority's efficiency standard under the call. No commissioning date was given 2.

Bidders were therefore pricing a green-power obligation into their proposals before a single building went up. Elsewhere the same arguments about power sourcing and efficiency arrive after consent is granted, when a project is already sunk and a regulator is negotiating with a built asset. Taiwan put a generation obligation on its largest electricity users in early August , a condition of the same kind imposed on operators already drawing power. Singapore has put them at the front, where the cost of the condition lands on the bid rather than on a retrofit.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Singapore does not have much space or spare electricity, so instead of letting anyone build a data centre who wants to, the government runs a competition for a fixed amount of new capacity. This time, four companies won a share each, and one of them, Digital Realty, only gets to keep its allocation if more than half the power it uses comes from green sources.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

Singapore has limited land and a power grid that cannot absorb unconstrained data-centre growth, so it rations new capacity through periodic calls rather than approving every credible application.

Conditioning Digital Realty's allocation on sourcing more than half its power from green sources reflects the same constraint from the emissions side: the city-state is using scarce new capacity as leverage to shape the fuel mix of what does get built, rather than regulating existing sites after the fact.

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