Jabez Tan interviewed on Channel News Asia about Singapore data centre market

• October 30, 2017

Source: Channel News Asia

Mr Jabez Tan, research director for data centres at Structure Research, said Mr Oei’s move has caught the industry off-guard because of the large sum involved.

“His strategy is one that not only spans Singapore, but all across Asia, so he’s looking at a pan-Asian data centre platform and that requires more than just S$6 billion or S$7 billion in investments. Nonetheless, it’s still a good way to start and it would definitely help to increase Singapore’s exposure as the lighthouse country in Asia for the development and growth of data centres.”

Structure Research’s data also showed data centres are projected to occupy 2.5 million sq ft of space by 2020, compared to the current 2.3 million sq ft this year.

Therefore, data centre operators in Singapore could face a land shortage.

Mr Tan said: “Land scarcity is definitely a big issue because data centres tend to take up a notable amount of land, but what we also see is that data centres consume a lot of power because the servers within the data centres emit a lot of heat and that requires a lot of cooling capacity to cool them. Otherwise, there will be a lot of data centre failures.”

“To cool these facilities, people have sought climate-friendly regions like in the Nordics, but in Singapore you don’t have that kind of favourable climate because it’s tropical weather; people have tried underground to have a cooler environment to cool the data centre racks.”

In fact, the first underground data centre is set to be deployed soon.

JTC has launched the concept and price tender for the project InfoComm Media Space Two located along Portsdown Road at Media Circle in one-north on Aug 31.

The site has an allowable gross floor area of 74,292 sq m, and a tenure of 30 years. The tender will close at 11am on Jan 30 next year.