Maximum Value, Not Maximum Compute: Singapore Opens Its First Data Centre Built to the Strict New Rules
For three years Singapore simply stopped saying yes. Between 2019 and 2022 the city-state froze approvals for new data centres while it worked out how an island with little land, imported energy and scarce water could keep hosting the servers that power the region’s digital economy. On November 6 the first building to come out of that rethink opened its doors in Jalan Tukang, in the west of the island: Equinix’s SG6, a nine-storey facility that cost the US operator US$290 million (S$370 million).
SG6 is one of four projects picked after the moratorium was lifted, and the selection criteria tell the story. Applicants were judged on sustainability, strategic contribution and economic value rather than on how fast or how big they could build. The building will start with roughly 1,550 server cabinets and deliver 20 megawatts of computing capacity once fully fitted out.
The number that matters: 1.2
The key benchmark is power usage effectiveness, or PUE — the ratio of all the electricity a site draws to the electricity that actually reaches the computers. A perfect score would be 1. The government’s pilot call for applications set a ceiling of 1.3; SG6 is designed for 1.2. Equinix says it chose that target because it believed it was achievable, and the gains come from unglamorous engineering: chillers chosen for efficiency, pumps tuned carefully and cooling equipment sized to the real load instead of oversized “just in case”.
Two further choices push the figure down. The halls will run at about 27°C, around two degrees warmer than at a typical data centre, which cuts the energy spent on cooling. And the facility supports liquid cooling, which pulls heat away from today’s power-hungry AI chips far more effectively than blowing cold air over them. Rooftop and façade solar panels and water-saving systems round out the design, and Equinix is targeting the BCA-IMDA Green Mark Platinum label.
A testbed inside a working site
One of the more unusual features is not yet open. From 2027, SG6 is due to host a research and testing facility developed with the National University of Singapore’s Energy Solutions Hub, where companies and researchers can run trials of up to a year inside a live data centre. The planned topics include liquid cooling, battery energy storage and digital twins — virtual models that let operators test a change in cooling settings on screen before touching the real machines.
Equinix says AI customers are already using SG6 but has not named them.
Singapore’s pitch to the region
Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Tan Kiat How used the opening to spell out a philosophy rather than a capacity target: Singapore wants “maximum value from compute”, not maximum compute. In his telling, the island should not try to win every megawatt in South-east Asia. Neighbours with more land and power can host the bulk; Singapore offers connectivity, capital, trusted institutions and proximity to businesses for workloads where reliability and security matter most.
The stakes are regional. Tan noted that data centres could account for about a fifth of ASEAN’s growth in electricity demand between 2025 and 2030 — a reason, he argued, to plan digital and energy infrastructure together. SG6 is a small building in that picture, but it is the first concrete answer to the question Singapore asked itself when it hit pause: how to keep growing without running out of room.