By Chua Hock Leng
Singapore continues to reinforce its status as a green city-state by integrating sustainability into urban design and planning.
Over the years, it has developed lush parks that embody the “city in nature” vision, promoted rooftop gardens and community farms to enhance local food production and green living, expanded its bicycle infrastructure, and refined its approach to water management.
Singapore’s recent Green Data Centre (DC) Roadmap, which includes plans to add 300 megawatts of power for data centres, further builds on Singapore Green Plan 2030 – marking a crucial step in balancing the city-state’s rising data centre economy with the need to reduce carbon emissions from increasing AI operations in data centres.
But the roadmap is just a vision, and its success hinges on overcoming a significant hurdle: rethinking how data is stored and processed in data centres to meet the nation’s carbon reduction targets.
AI workloads are notoriously energy-intensive. The public sector alone – which leverages data centres to manage data to ensure the effective and continuous delivery of public services – is already facing the challenge of balancing energy efficiency and AI data demands.
According to Pure Storage’s latest study, 77 per cent of public agencies in Singapore are concerned about the rising energy consumption driven by AI deployment. Furthermore, 99 per cent have reported at least a 50 per cent increase in data storage demand due to AI. These underscore the urgency of a paradigm shift in the city-state’s data centre operations amid the rapid growth of AI applications and use cases across industries.
Operating within constraints
In spite of its small size, Singapore currently houses over 70 data centres and is shaping up to be one of the world’s key data centre hubs. Rapid data centre expansion, however, is increasingly straining energy resources and competing with other essential needs.
If left unchecked, this growth could siphon off electricity required for crucial areas such as housing, manufacturing, and infrastructure development. For instance, in London, the rise in data centres has already impacted residential construction, while in Chicago’s suburbs, new data facilities are displacing residential areas.
Singapore needs data centres to accelerate economic development under National AI Strategy 2.0, but not at the expense of the environment.
The crux of the issue lies in the IT infrastructure used in our data centres today, many of which are still on legacy equipment. Over 80 per cent of all data stored globally still spins on archaic 70-year-old mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) technology.
A more energy-efficient alternative is semiconductor-based flash storage solutions offer greater storage efficiency, a longer lifespan, create over three times less e-waste, and can also reduce physical space requirements by up to 94 per cent.
Accelerating the transition to energy-efficient data centres
In spite of the long-term benefits of transitioning from HDDs to direct flash storage due to their superior energy efficiency, many data centres continue to rely on energy-intensive HDDs. This is concerning, given Singapore’s energy constraints, and could impede progress towards the nation’s climate goals.
Encouraging partnerships between technology providers, data centre operators, and governmental bodies can help facilitate knowledge sharing and accelerate the adoption of more sustainable practices in data centres. Greater access to technical support will also help data centres plan upgrades more effectively and make the transition to more efficient technologies smoother and less daunting.
Establishing new guidelines for measuring the efficiency of compute, networking, storage, and cooling systems and incentivising data centres could go a long way in accelerating this transition. For example, a practical policy could involve tracking the maximum watts of electricity used per terabyte of stored data, to help ensure more energy-efficient operations.
Setting the green standard
Singapore has an opportunity to lead the charge in adopting environmentally friendly and energy efficient solutions as it positions itself as a global AI hub.
Now more than ever, data centres have a greater responsibility to balance innovation and the nation’s ESG goals. By cutting power consumption, optimising space, and minimising e-waste, data centres in the city-state can support the Singapore Green Plan 2030, even as they manage rising AI workloads.
This approach not only supports a cleaner, greener future but also enhances the city-state’s reputation as an AI leader. By elevating its AI sustainability index, Singapore can inspire other markets in Asia Pacific to follow suit and redefine the standard for sustainable AI.
