How Singapore decides which data centres get power: 2019 to DC-CFA2

Singapore does not let data centre operators simply build as much as they like. Since a pause announced in 2019, new capacity has been released in rounds called Calls for Application. The 2026 round gave 200 megawatts to four operators, all on Jurong Island, under tight efficiency and green energy conditions.

That one paragraph hides a lot of detail, and the detail matters if you plan AI capacity in Southeast Asia, sell into the region, or simply want to understand why so much of the build out is happening across the border. This post walks through the rules in order: what happened, what each round demanded, what the government says about power, cooling and water, and what remains uncertain.

For the wider picture of how Singapore and Johor in Malaysia fit together, read the companion post on Singapore and Malaysia AI data centres: power, water and Johor. For the regional map, see the Asia Pacific overview. This post stays on one question: how does Singapore decide who gets capacity?

Key numbers at a glance

• Total data centre capacity in Singapore: more than 1.4 gigawatts (IMDA Green Data Centre Roadmap, published 2024).
• Near term aim for new capacity: at least 300 megawatts (IMDA Green Data Centre Roadmap, 2024).
• Pause on data centre growth announced: 2019 (EDB and IMDA release, 20 July 2022).
• Pilot call launched: 20 July 2022 (EDB release of that date).
• Pilot call result: 80 megawatts to four winners, announced in 2023 (W.Media report on the later round; Conventus Law, 9 January 2026).
• Second call launched: 1 December 2025, at least 200 megawatts on offer (EDB and IMDA fact sheet).
• Proposal deadline for the second call: 31 March 2026 (Conventus Law, 9 January 2026).
• Second call result: 200 megawatts provisionally allocated on 21 August 2026, 50 megawatts each to four operators (EDB and IMDA fact sheet).
• Proposals received in the second call: more than 20 (EDB and IMDA fact sheet, 21 August 2026).
• Efficiency threshold in the second call: PUE of 1.25 or better at 100 percent IT load, against 1.3 in the pilot (EDB and IMDA fact sheet; Conventus Law).
• Green energy threshold: at least 50 percent of power from eligible green pathways (EDB and IMDA fact sheet, 1 December 2025).
• Target for all data centres: PUE of 1.3 or lower at full IT load within 10 years of the 2024 roadmap (IMDA).
• Median water usage effectiveness of large water users in 2021: 2.2 cubic metres per megawatt hour, with a target of 2.0 or lower within 10 years (IMDA, 2024).
• Next call: agencies will review the need for another one in 18 to 24 months from August 2026 (EDB and IMDA fact sheet).

What is a Call for Application, and why does Singapore use one?

A data centre needs three things from a government in a place like Singapore: land, a grid connection and permission. Singapore is a small city state, so land and power are both scarce, and the state decides how much of each goes to data centres.

The tool it uses is the Call for Application, shortened to DC-CFA. The Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) publish the criteria, operators submit proposals, and the agencies pick winners and give them capacity. The second call fact sheet says plainly that the DC-CFA is "the primary mechanism for DC capacity allocation".

Notice what this is not. It is not a ban, and it is not a first come first served queue. It is a competition where the prize is permission to add a set number of megawatts. A megawatt, for readers new to the unit, is a million watts of electrical power. A hall of AI servers can draw many megawatts at once, so the number of megawatts is a direct measure of how much computing a site can run.

There is also a second route. The same fact sheet describes the Strategic Digital Infrastructure Scheme, which the government keeps for "companies with uniquely differentiated value propositions", seeking proposals with "transformative and outsized strategic and economic outcomes". It does not give figures for that scheme, so this post cannot say how much capacity has gone through it.

The 2019 pause and the 2022 pilot

In its July 2022 release, EDB and IMDA said the government had told industry of a "temporary pause in the growth of DCs in 2019" and began a review. They then consulted the data centre sector, industrial customers and sustainability solution providers to set the parameters for new capacity. The release ties the push for greener data centres to Singapore's obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The release does not give a megawatt figure for the pilot call. It lists three kinds of data centre the agencies wanted to partner with:

• Those that adopt state of the art technology and sustainability practice, especially energy efficiency and decarbonisation.
• Those that strengthen Singapore's international connectivity and its role as a regional hub.
• Those that make a significant contribution to wider economic goals.

The result came in 2023. According to W.Media, the pilot allocated 80 megawatts in total to four winners. A Conventus Law article by Withers names them as Equinix, Microsoft, GDS Holdings and a joint venture between AirTrunk and ByteDance, and says the pilot required a PUE of 1.3. Those recipient names come from that law firm article, not from an official EDB release, so check them against the government announcement if you rely on them.

PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, is the ratio of all the energy a data centre uses to the energy used by the computing equipment alone. IMDA's roadmap describes it as an internationally recognised measure of facility level efficiency. A PUE of 1.0 would mean every watt goes to the servers. A PUE of 1.3 means that for every 100 units of IT energy, about 30 more go to cooling, power conversion and other overhead. The roadmap adds a footnote that at PUE 1.3 the mechanical and electrical systems use around 24 percent of the facility's energy, while a PUE between 1.5 and 2.0 implies roughly 33 to 50 percent.

The 2024 Green Data Centre Roadmap

In 2024 IMDA published a roadmap that explains the thinking behind the rules. It is a useful read because it states the government's reasoning in its own words.

First, the size of the market. The roadmap says Singapore is a regional data centre hub with total capacity exceeding 1.4 gigawatts, and that its operational capacity per capita exceeds that of Australia, China, Japan, Korea and the UK. It says the digital economy contributes about 17 percent of gross domestic product. It also includes a figure showing the data centre sector's share of greenhouse gas emissions from the domestic information and communications sector at 82 percent. Treat that last number as IMDA's own, from its booklet, and note that it is a share of one sector's emissions, not of the national total.

Second, the stated goal. The roadmap says the government aims to provide "at least 300 megawatts (MW) of additional capacity in the near term, with much more through green energy deployments". Simple arithmetic is worth doing here. Eighty megawatts from the pilot plus 200 megawatts from the second call is 280 megawatts, a little under that near term aim. That sum is ours, not a government statement, and the agencies may count differently, for example by including capacity released through other schemes.

Third, the two fronts on which operators are expected to push: energy efficiency, and green energy that could unlock more capacity.

On efficiency, the roadmap says current designs can reach PUE of 1.3 or lower at full IT load, and it aims to bring all data centres in Singapore to that level over 10 years. It says retrofits of chillers, uninterruptible power supplies and room air handlers could cut the energy used by supporting infrastructure by 50 percent in simulations. It also says its Tropical Data Centre approach, which runs halls at higher temperature and humidity, can save 2 to 5 percent of cooling energy for every 1 degree Celsius increase in operating temperature.

On cooling for AI, the roadmap is blunt about why density matters. It says average rack density roughly quadrupled from 2.4 kilowatts per rack in 2011 to 8.4 kilowatts per rack in 2020, and that AI racks can need 20 to over 100 kilowatts. Air cooling, it says, can support racks up to about 20 kilowatts, and liquid cooling is needed above that. It describes three liquid approaches: rear door heat exchangers that can be retrofitted, direct to chip cold plates, and immersion cooling.

On green energy, the roadmap lists the sources it recognises "for a start": bioenergy, fuel cells with carbon capture, low carbon hydrogen and ammonia, and vertical building integrated photovoltaics. It says future capacity rounds will ask operators to propose viable low carbon energy sources on top of efficiency commitments. That promise is exactly what the second call delivered.

What DC-CFA2 required

The second call launched on 1 December 2025. The fact sheet says at least 200 megawatts would be available, "with potentially more through the adoption of new and innovative green energy pathways". Proposals were assessed on three axes.

Strategic: show how the project strengthens Singapore as a trusted hub for technology such as AI, and improves international connectivity and infrastructure resilience.

Economic: state fixed asset investment and total business expenditure, and propose research, product innovation, talent or partnership activity that grows the digital economy and helps Singapore based companies compete.

Sustainability, which had the hardest numbers:

• Green Mark for Data Centres 2024 Platinum certification, a Building and Construction Authority and IMDA scheme.
• PUE of 1.25 or better at 100 percent IT load.
• IT equipment meeting the Singapore Standard on energy efficiency of data centre IT equipment, SS 715:2025, plus measures with users to raise equipment utilisation.
• At least 50 percent of the new capacity powered by eligible green pathways: biomethane, low carbon ammonia, low carbon hydrogen, novel fuel cells with carbon capture and storage, or vertical building integrated or building applied photovoltaics.

The Conventus Law article adds that applicants had to show how they use AI in operations, for example in predictive maintenance or in tuning cooling to real time load, and says SS 715:2025 aims to cut IT equipment energy use by at least 30 percent. It gives the proposal deadline as 31 March 2026. These extra details come from the law firm summary rather than the fact sheet, which does not list them.

Compare the pilot and the second call and a pattern appears. The efficiency bar tightened from a PUE of 1.3 to 1.25. The pilot's requirements were mostly about efficiency and economic value, while the second call added a mandatory green energy share. The agencies are using each round to push the industry one step further than the last.

The August 2026 result

On 21 August 2026 EDB and IMDA announced that they had provisionally allocated 200 megawatts to four operators, 50 megawatts each: Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel Data Centres and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres. More than 20 proposals had come from local and global players. The word provisionally matters, because it signals that allocations are subject to further steps and conditions the fact sheet does not detail.

The fact sheet says the four operators committed to exceed the minimum sustainability requirements. They will power more than 50 percent of their capacity from green sources, adopt liquid cooling and use 100 percent energy efficient IT equipment, including meeting Green Mark Platinum. A footnote in the same document says liquid cooling "can reduce energy consumption at the DC level by over 30%" compared with traditional air cooling. That is the agencies' claim, and real results depend on design and load.

The location is the other news. JTC, the government's industrial landowner, is developing a low carbon data centre park on Jurong Island, and the fact sheet says the supported data centres will locate their facilities there. The fact sheet says the park is meant to use potential low carbon technology synergies within the island's ecosystem. W.Media describes the park as a testbed for new energy technologies. Whether those fuel supply chains exist at the scale needed is a separate question that nobody has answered with data yet.

The fact sheet ends with a line about the future: EDB and IMDA "will continue to engage industry stakeholders and review the need for another Call for Application in 18 to 24 months". That is not a promise of a third call. It is a statement that one will be considered.

Water: the other half of the rules

Energy gets the headlines, but the roadmap spends a section on water. It says data centre water demand is expected to increase. It reports that in 2021 the median water usage effectiveness (WUE) of large water users, meaning those with net consumption of at least 60,000 cubic metres in the previous year, was 2.2 cubic metres per megawatt hour. WUE is total water consumed divided by the energy used by IT equipment.

The government's aim, working with the national water agency PUB, is to help new and existing data centres reach 2.0 or lower within 10 years. The roadmap says cooling towers account for up to 97 percent of a data centre's water use, so recycling blowdown water and raising the cycles of concentration, which measure how many times water is reused before being flushed, offers the biggest savings. It also says data centres using at least 60,000 cubic metres a year must follow PUB's Mandatory Water Efficiency Management Practices, including private water meters at key points and a Water Efficiency Plan submitted to PUB.

The roadmap describes a published, mandatory water management regime for large users. This post did not check how it compares with neighbouring markets in detail. For the Malaysian side, see the companion post on how Malaysia handles data centre power and water.

Why this matters outside Singapore

Singapore's rule making can matter beyond its borders. When a market with strong connectivity caps its capacity, buyers who need more compute may look elsewhere in the region, though this post does not measure how much demand moves. The roadmap itself points to Singapore's international position, including a plan to double the number of submarine cable landings over the next 10 years. Operators that win capacity in Singapore pay for it with efficiency and green energy commitments. Other capacity is being built in neighbouring places such as Johor and Batam, which the companion posts cover.

For AI labs and cloud customers, there are three practical readings:

• Singapore capacity is scarce and allocated, so it tends to go to latency sensitive or strategic workloads where the premium is justified.
• Large training clusters are more likely to appear where land and power are available at scale. For how labs reason about those choices, see Anthropic compute commitments explained and OpenAI compute commitments and Stargate.
• Rules change by round. The 2025 requirements are stricter than 2022, and a third call could shift them again.

What is firm and what is uncertain

Firm, because official documents say so:

• The 2019 pause, the 2022 pilot and the 1 December 2025 launch of the second call.
• The 200 megawatt provisional allocation on 21 August 2026, the four named operators and the Jurong Island location.
• The sustainability requirements listed in the fact sheet.
• The roadmap's 10 year targets for facility efficiency and water use.

Uncertain or unconfirmed:

• The recipients and size of the pilot round come from secondary sources in this post.
• Whether the roadmap's 300 megawatt aim has been met depends on how the agencies count.
• Allocations are provisional. Final timing for capacity to come online is not given.
• Whether green energy supply such as low carbon ammonia or hydrogen can scale to the 50 percent share is untested, and the fact sheets give no volumes.
• Whether a third call will happen, and on what terms.
• Figures in the roadmap are 2021 or 2024 data. Current usage may differ.

What to watch next

• Any announcement of a third Call for Application, which the agencies said they would consider in 18 to 24 months from August 2026.
• Progress on the Jurong Island low carbon data centre park.
• The refreshed standards the roadmap promised, including liquid cooling standards.
• Whether Singapore revises the PUE and WUE targets as AI racks get denser.
• How operators with Singapore allocations split work between Singapore and Johor.

For teams tracking the software that runs inside these facilities, Safeguard offers SBOM and dependency scanning, with a free scan at https://gold.safeguard.sh/scan.

Quick check

Sources

• EDB, Pilot data centre call for application, 20 July 2022
• IMDA, Green Data Centre Roadmap, 2024
• EDB and IMDA fact sheet, Launch of second data centre call for application, 1 December 2025
• EDB and IMDA fact sheet, Four data centre proposals selected, 21 August 2026
• Conventus Law, Singapore's second data centre call for application, 9 January 2026
• W.Media, Singapore's DC-CFA2 winners announced

Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.