Four companies just won the right to build 200 megawatts of new data centre capacity in Singapore, and the government has tied every megawatt of it to a low-carbon power supply and liquid cooling.
Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel Data Centers and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres each received a 50MW allocation under the Second Data Centre Call for Application, or DC-CFA2, the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Infocomm Media Development Authority said on 20 August 2026. None of the four disclosed a construction timeline.
The stakes are regional. Singapore locked down new data centre builds in 2019 after power and land ran short, then began releasing capacity in small, conditional tranches. This round is the largest since that moratorium, and it lands in a region where the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor has been absorbing overflow demand that Singapore could not house. Bitdeer AI is leasing 65MW in Johor, and Tencent Cloud has announced a cloud region in Malaysia. Whatever Singapore refuses to build keeps moving south, and this allocation says how much of that Singapore intends to pull back.
What the winners have to do
The conditions are the story here, not the megawatts. Under the terms, 50 percent of each operator's capacity must be supplied by low-carbon sources including biomethane, low-carbon ammonia or hydrogen. All four committed to liquid cooling at their sites.
None of that is cheap. Liquid cooling requires new plumbing, new rack designs and, in some cases, purpose-built halls that cannot take conventional air-cooled equipment later. It is the kind of commitment that looks smart on a press release and shows up as capital expenditure for years.
The EDB and IMDA received more than 20 proposals before applications closed in April. Twenty-plus bidders chasing 200MW means the government had its pick of the best-capitalised players, and it used that leverage to attach strings that smaller operators could not have absorbed.
Jurong Island gets a low-carbon data centre park
The four projects will sit at a low-carbon data centre park on Jurong Island, a man-made island southwest of Singapore that has served as the country's petrochemical and energy hub for decades. JTC, the government agency under the Ministry of Trade and Industry, is developing the park.
Siting data centres next to an industrial energy cluster is not decoration. The idea is that hydrogen, biomethane and ammonia infrastructure already serving the island's industrial tenants can be tapped by the data centres next door, rather than built twice.
Keppel gave the most concrete detail of the four. Its allocation will support Keppel Data Centre Singapore 11, an S$1 billion project funded by Keppel Data Centre Fund III and its co-investors. Digital Realty said its capacity will go toward a new site at the park, and noted that total potential investment in Singapore for the company is nearly S$7 billion.
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres already runs nine facilities in Singapore. Bruno Lopez, the company's president and group CEO, framed the win as an obligation rather than a trophy.
"As a Singapore-grown and headquartered company, we are deeply honoured to be selected under DC-CFA2," Lopez said. "We recognise the privilege and responsibility that come with being entrusted to develop critical digital infrastructure and we are committed to using Singapore's precious land, energy and water resources prudently to deliver meaningful and lasting value for the country."
A small city with a hard power ceiling
Singapore hosts more than 70 data centres on an island of roughly 730 square kilometres. The Green Data Centre Roadmap published in May 2024 put existing capacity at about 1.4 gigawatts and promised at least 300MW of new capacity, plus another 200MW reserved for operators who would use green energy.
DC-CFA2 is the mechanism for paying that promise out. A first, smaller round in 2023 sent 80MW to Equinix, GDS, Microsoft and a consortium of AirTrunk and ByteDance. The 2026 round is 2.5 times that size.
Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, announcing the roadmap, called balancing the digital economy against the net zero target by 2050 a "critical issue". The digital sector contributes close to a fifth of Singapore's GDP, so the government cannot simply cap capacity and let the industry move. It also cannot keep building at will. That tension is why every allocation since 2019 has come with conditions attached.
Cooling is where the money goes
The 50 percent low-carbon requirement and the liquid cooling commitment point at the same problem. AI racks draw far more power per square metre than the servers they replaced, and air cooling stops working cleanly at those densities.
Singapore's roadmap puts it plainly: immersion cooling, where servers sit submerged in a thermally conductive dielectric fluid, is the most energy-efficient approach because it removes air cooling from the picture entirely. The trade-off is that an immersion facility is a dedicated build. You cannot repurpose a conventional hall for it without ripping it apart.
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres is one of the early adopters of immersion cooling at scale in Singapore, running it at its Loyang facility. The company has said the method can cut the energy footprint of producing AI cloud services by up to 50 percent compared with traditional cloud services today.
Digital Realty is taking a less disruptive path. Jon Curry, the company's vice president of operations for Asia-Pacific, said it plans to raise the temperature of one of its data halls to 26 degrees Celsius gradually. His argument was straightforward: customers get a lower electricity bill.
Raise the thermostat, spend less on chillers. It is not as dramatic as submerging hardware in fluid, and it does not require a greenfield site. Whether that counts toward the DC-CFA2 sustainability bar is not something the EDB spelled out in its announcement.
What this means for Indonesia
Indonesian cloud buyers should read this as a signal about where regional capacity is being built and on what terms. Singapore's share of Southeast Asia's colocation supply has been flat for years, held back by power and land, and Malaysia has taken up the slack. This round adds 200MW to Singapore without loosening the energy constraints that caused the slowdown.
The EDB and IMDA said they will review whether another DC-CFA is needed in 18 to 24 months. That cadence matters more than any single tranche. Singapore has settled into a rhythm of rationed releases, and each one has come with tighter conditions than the last.
Sanjay Podder, chairman of the Green Software Foundation, made the point at the 2024 roadmap launch that the data centre shell is only half the problem.
"Good software programming is something we have lost track of as lazy programmers in this new era of abundance," he said.
That is a fair complaint, and it is the part operators control cheapest. Moving workloads off inefficient code costs developer time. Building 200MW of liquid-cooled capacity on a low-carbon park costs a billion Singapore dollars at a stretch, and that bill is coming from the operators.
It is not clear the 18-to-24-month review will produce anything larger. The grid is still the grid. But if Singapore keeps the conditions and raises the size, the pattern holds: capacity here will keep going to whoever can fund the cooling and the clean power, and everyone else will look at Batam, Johor or Bali for racks.
More regional coverage of data centre buildouts and edge infrastructure is available in our cloud and edge desk reporting. The Singapore Economic Development Board published the full fact sheet, and Data Center Dynamics reported the allocation terms first.