Singapore Plans 700MW Data Centre Park on Jurong Island as Demand Soars

Singapore has set aside a piece of land in the city-state’s southern Jurong Island for a data centre park with up to 700 megawatts of power capacity, according to a Monday announcement.

The data centres are to be developed on 20 hectares (49 acres) of Jurong Island, an energy and chemicals hub formed from seven small islands into a single 3,000 hectare landmass. The new facilities will be required to meet efficiency standards, adopt advanced cooling systems and tap renewable energy sources, the government said in a release.

The plan was first revealed Monday morning in remarks at Singapore International Energy Week by the minister-in-charge of science and energy & technology, Tan See Leng, who framed the initiative as part of efforts to turn Jurong Island into “a global testbed for new energies and low-carbon technologies”. The government earlier committed more than S$180 million ($138 million) to a research programme to advance low-carbon tech across sectors.

“Jurong Island has grown into a leading regional hub for energy and chemicals through its strong infrastructure and tightly connected ecosystem,” said Jacqueline Poh, chief executive of JTC Corporation, which regulates industrial development in Singapore. “Now is the time for bold steps to transform it into a centre for new energies and low-carbon innovation — strengthening infrastructure, deepening industry collaboration, building sustainable solutions to power Singapore’s next phase of growth.”

New Realities Shape Policy

The digital infrastructure push comes less than four years after the Singapore government lifted a 2019 moratorium on new data centre construction with a vow to be “more selective” with future projects to address fears of excessive energy consumption.

In 2023, the government provisionally awarded the rights to develop a total of 80MW of power capacity to data centre projects led by US giants Equinix and Microsoft, China’s GDS Holdings and a tie-up of Australian platform AirTrunk and TikTok parent ByteDance.

While analysts had speculated when the pilot programme was launched that no more than three proposals would be accepted for a total of 60MW, the award exceeded those initial estimates as it nodded to the growing importance of computing capacity to economic competitiveness.

With capacity demand continuing to increase with the rise of artificial intelligence models, the government’s Green Data Centre Roadmap released last year said Singapore aimed to provide at least 300MW of additional capacity in the near term, as well as “much more” to follow through green energy deployments.

The proposed data centre park on Jurong Island would provide further capacity equivalent to half of Singapore’s current capacity of 1.4 gigawatts.

“Operators can leverage the island’s ecosystem, such as shared energy storage infrastructure and utilities, ample power capacity as well as emerging low carbon energy sources,” the government said in Monday’s announcement.

Southeast Asia Spillover

Asia Pacific added nearly 2.3GW to its data centre pipeline in the first half of 2025 as more operators sought to build facilities equipped to handle AI workloads, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report.

The figure reflected a 193 percent jump in Thailand from a low base and a 70 percent increase in Malaysia, with the two Southeast Asian nations combining to account for 64 percent of new planned capacity during the half, as investors and developers explored regional options beyond land-scarce and tightly regulated Singapore.

APAC’s total operational capacity stood at 12.7GW at the end of the half, with 3.2GW under construction and a further 13.3GW in the planning stages, the consultancy said.