Mr Speaker, I support the introduction of the Digital Infrastructure Bill, and I will spend most of my time on Part 4. I have been following developments in the data centre industry closely in recent years and have asked a number of Parliamentary Questions on it. I believe it is useful to provide some context to our debate today with statistics drawn from the replies to those questions.
In February 2021, I asked the then Minister for Trade and Industry how many data centres had been approved for construction over the preceding five years and on what terms any moratorium had been imposed, since it was widely understood in the industry that a moratorium had been in place since 2019. Minister Chan Chun Sing replied that 14 data centres with 768 MW of IT capacity had been approved on industrial State land in those five years, against 12 data centres and 307 MW in the five years before. Approved capacity had grown two and a half times in half a decade, and the Government had responded in 2019 by pausing the release of State land for data centres.
I welcomed that pause then and I still do. It was an honest acknowledgment that land, power and water are scarce here in a way they are not in most jurisdictions we compete with.
In January 2022, I asked again about capacity and limits. The then Minister for Trade and Industry, Mr Gan Kim Yong, replied that there were more than 70 operational data centres with about 1,000 MW of available IT capacity, and that we would henceforth be selective and anchor only facilities best-in-class in resource efficiency.
Where are we now? In February this year, the Minister for Digital Development and Information told this House that we still have more than 70 data centres, but total capacity exceeds 1.4 GW. Her ministry's press release of 8 September puts it at over 1.6 GW. It is unclear to me whether the recently awarded 200MW of capacity is part of the 1.6GW, or whether capacity is now slated to reach 1.8GW. In any case, in November 2024, replying to my Sengkang colleague Ms He Ting Ru, she also confirmed that our operational data centre capacity per capita exceeds that of Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo.
In recent years, compute demand has expanded rapidly, driven by artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and other data-intensive applications. That demand is translating into demand for data centres across the world. Governments are now confronting the consequences for electricity grids, water, land, emissions and household affordability. At least 12 US states filed data centre moratorium bills this session and more than 50 local moratoriums have been adopted. In July, New York became the first American state to impose a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres, by executive order, its Governor citing the risk that such development would hike up utility bills, deplete natural resources and burden the grid. My speech today will thus be largely focused on Part 4 of the Bill, but I will first speak briefly on Part 3.
Security and resilience: a licence cannot confer access
I support the introduction of the new licensing regime to strengthen the security and resilience of major cloud services and data centres in Singapore. The ministry's own examples from the press release on 8 September make the case, including the October 2023 cooling failure that disrupted more than 2.5 million banking transactions and over 810,000 access attempts.
However, I return to my exchange with SMS Tan Kiat How in this House on 5th May 2026, when we debated AI-enabled cyber risks. The SMS confirmed then that the Government does not have access to Anthropic's Mythos model and was not aware of any local bank that had been granted access. In June this year, it was reported that Anthropic would extend Mythos to a further 150 organisations in more than 15 countries, which according to an FT article included countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Switzerland, as well as NATO and the European Union's cybersecurity agency. None of the jurisdictions named in that reporting was in Southeast Asia, and critically, Singapore was not among them.
Mr Speaker, no licensing regime can close that asymmetry. Under Clause 15, the Bill will require our major operators to defend themselves to a prescribed standard, yet we are not equipping our nation and our operators with the best-in-class tools available. Rather than leaving it to commercial decisions, may I ask the Minister whether the Government has stepped up diplomatic and government-to-government representations, to secure access to the top tier models for our cyber security agency and our critical information infrastructure owners? This is especially so given how DPM Gan has described our partnership with the US as one “that is mutually beneficial, deeply integrated, and anchored in trust”, and that beyond economics, our ties extend to defence, technology, and innovation. Further, given that Anthropic opens its Singapore office this month and OpenAI has had its Asia headquarters here since 2024, is their presence and our trusted partnership with the US being used as leverage in those conversations?
Do we actually need this many data centres?
Moving on to Part 4 of the Bill, the philosophical question that we need to ask ourselves is this: do we actually need this many data centres?
I am not arguing that Singapore should reject cloud computing, AI or companies such as the leading hyperscalers and frontier AI labs. In fact, if the additional capacity awarded were earmarked for sovereign purposes, or for the so-called “HDB model” for compute that I proposed in this House in August, that would be a welcome development. The question is whether hosting a very large stock of data centres is genuinely a comparative advantage for Singapore, and whether this is the aspect of the AI supply chain that we want to compete in.
We have swung from having a data centre moratorium to wanting to provide at least 300MW of additional capacity in the near term, with much more through green energy deployments. And in the short span of four plus years, data centre capacity has risen by some 60% from about 1GW to 1.6GW.
On the industry association's own advocacy figures, drawn from a 2023 study, data centres here add over S$2 billion a year to our economy, or about 0.3% of GDP, while employing just 7,000 people directly and a further 17,000 through the supply chain, or about 0.7% of employment in total. Set against a sector that consumed about 7% of national electricity back in 2020.
Meanwhile Johor has more than 1,100 MW of operational capacity and an incoming pipeline as high as more than 8,500MW according to a consultancy report, and Johor does not face the same land constraints that we do. But our comparative advantage lies in hosting the decisions, the capital and the engineers. I agree that there needs to be a certain level of local data centre capacity on sovereign considerations, but my question to the Minister is, does the Government intend to set a target level of data centre capacity, whether in MW terms or in TWh, as a share of national electricity consumption? If there is to be no ceiling, under what specific circumstances will capacity be released beyond the 200 MW of DC-CFA2 and the “much more” additional capacity through green energy deployments?
Public disclosures for transparency and public understanding
To the specifics of the Bill, Clause 35 requires licensees to meet prescribed energy, water efficiency and equipment-level energy efficiency requirements. Clause 36 further requires regular reports to the Authority, which may be audited. Clause 37 allows for codes of practice, but these have no legislative effect, even as non-compliance may be enforced under Clause 38. Regardless, I did not see any requirement for public disclosures of such information in the Bill.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, requires operators to publish energy efficiency and key technical data on the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department's website. Equinix, on its own 2024 disclosure, already publishes a global average PUE of 1.39, a water usage effectiveness of 0.95 and 96 per cent renewable coverage. Digital Realty similarly publishes its key efficiency statistics in its Impact Report, whose 2025 edition reports 93 per cent renewable energy coverage. If leading operators disclose voluntarily, what is the case for statutory confidentiality here?
I hope the Government can consider requiring the publication of PUE and WUE at facility level, or at minimum the operator level, with a transition period for older assets. I would also ask that the Government publish an annual aggregate of the sector's electricity and water consumption, in absolute terms and as a share of national consumption.
Is the green energy commitment realistic?
Next, on green energy commitments. In his written reply to my question of 10 September on DC-CFA2, the Minister for Trade and Industry replied that the four provisionally awarded projects carry a combined 200 MW, around 12 per cent of our total data centre capacity, that their demand will be drawn primarily from the national grid supplemented by on-site solar, and that more than half of that capacity will be powered by Singapore-based low-carbon generation from building-integrated photovoltaics and fuels such as biomethane, ammonia and hydrogen.
Take 200 MW of critical IT load at the roadmap PUE of 1.3, running at a conservative 80 per cent utilisation. That is roughly 1.8 TWh a year, of which more than half, say 0.9 TWh, must come from Singapore-based low-carbon generation. Our entire national solar fleet, once we reach the raised target of 3 GWp in 2030, is expected to generate about 2.8 TWh a year. EMA itself notes solar can realistically supply only around 10 per cent of our projected energy needs by 2050.
So on those assumptions, which I am happy to be corrected, the Singapore-based low-carbon commitment of DC-CFA2 alone is equivalent to roughly a third of everything our national solar fleet will produce in 2030. And DC-CFA2 is just about 12% of our current data centre capacity. Mr Speaker, sunlight falling on Singapore is a fixed quantity, as is the amount of solar energy we can generate from it. While data centres may sign power purchase agreements with local generation companies, it merely reallocates a constrained national resource. While biomethane, ammonia and hydrogen are additional pathways, it remains unclear just how much green energy is currently being generated and expected to be generated in the near future from these sources. Will the Minister provide further clarity on how the Government plans to ensure that the data centre operators from DC-CFA2 and potentially the rest of the sector can meet their green energy commitments?
Who pays for the grid?
Further, even as I welcome the intention to prescribe a facility-level energy efficiency requirement under Clause 35, and I would ask whether it will be set at a PUE of 1.3 and whether it will bind existing facilities, adding more data centres still raises Singapore's absolute consumption and emissions, particularly as the increasingly dense AI server racks filled with advanced chips consume significantly more electricity than legacy co-location data centres.
Based on statistics from the Energy Market Authority, Singapore consumed 58 TWh of electricity in 2024, with the information and communications sector growing 12.3% in that year alone. EMA's own Electricity Demand and Supply Outlook forecasts system peak demand growing 2.4 to 4.8% a year to 2034, an increase of 2.0 GW to 4.3 GW. In 2030 the base case peak is 9.4 GW against an upper bound of 10.8 GW, with generation of 67,600 GWh against 80,400 GWh. EMA states explicitly that the upper bound reflects demand from emerging high-demand industrial and digital sectors, naming data centres.
Can the Minister share his Ministry’s projections for data centre development over the next 10 years, and whether our electricity generation capacity and green energy generation capacity can meet the electricity demand from data centres, and whether the current planning assumptions still allow for our reserve margin of 27% to be met comfortably for power system reliability?
Further, how much has the 60% increase in additional data centre capacity over the last four years contributed to electricity prices, what are the associated costs of infrastructure upgrades and how much is the incoming data centre capacity expected to impact household electricity prices?
The question of who pays is an important one. In the US state of Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centres globally, regulators authorised a separate rate category for the largest electricity consumers, including data centres, to enable the charging of differentiated electricity rates while also implementing an electricity consumption tax of 1.1 cents per kWh on data centre operators. US regulators are also increasingly considering large load tariffs, to fairly allocate and recover associated costs to accommodating significant power demands of large customers such as data centres.
Conclusion
Mr Speaker, I welcome the move to implement two new licensing regimes to strengthen the security and resilience of major cloud services and data centres and the environmental sustainability of data centre operations in Singapore. On the former, I hope that the Government can support licensees and other critical infrastructure providers in Singapore with access to the best tools available, and on the latter, I hope that we can seriously consider the aspect of the AI supply chain that we want Singapore to compete in.
Notwithstanding my clarifications and reservations, I support the Bill.
