Several key drivers enable the growth of data centres in Singapore. They include the rise of e-commerce and other strategic growth areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the digital transformation of businesses and the Government as a result of COVID-19 (including significant demands from contact tracing and vaccine operations) and the Government’s strategic efforts that rely on data management and analytics (including the “Singapore 2030 Green Plan”).
At the same time, government stakeholders have raised concerns about the significant environmental impacts of data centres (with limited direct economic payoffs), which has led to the 2019 imposition of a two-year moratorium on new data centre construction in Singapore that remained in place until January 2022. The Government recently announced plans to pilot a new framework designed to ensure that new data centres are resource-efficient and contribute to Singapore’s economic and strategic objectives.
The Green Data Centres report, prepared by AlphaBeta (a subsidiary of Access Partnership) for Amazon Web Services (AWS), aims to inform the ongoing discourse by providing a precise, fact-based analysis of the current economic and environmental contributions of Singapore’s data centres, as well as how the industry could evolve under different scenarios from now until 2030. It also outlines some critical actions required from the Government and the industry to ensure the latter’s sustainable, long-term development.
