Data centres play an important role as the infrastructure backbone of Singapore’s digital economy. Due to ever-increasing computing demand such as emerging technologies in 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, data centres consumed vast amounts of energy when in operations.  Geographically, Singapore also faces lower disaster risk (i.e., earthquakes, tsunamis) and higher resilience due to its robust infrastructure, hence boosting local data centres usage and lowering disaster resilience spending as compared to neighbouring countries with higher disaster risks¹.

These data centres accounted for about 7 per cent of Singapore’s total electricity consumption in 2020², which amounted to an estimate of 35 to 40 per cent of the total power required to run a data centre³. One of the contributors to the energy usage comes from the computer room air conditioning (CRAC) unit. As a solution to maintain the temperature in a data centre, many deployed CRACs tend to overcompensate by avoiding risky hot spots within the server rack housing where exhaust heat from these computers is trapped. This could potentially accumulate higher utility costs to generate cooler air which could worsen with the advent of more powerful CPUs for faster data processing, leading to higher power usage and heat generation.

 Read the full article by A*STAR here.