Equinix will build its sixth data center in Singapore, one of the first facilities to be established in the city following a three-year ban on new construction.
Equinix announced Tuesday that it has broken ground on its sixth International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Singapore with an initial investment of $260 million.
The nine-story facility, which is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2027, will provide 20MW when fully built. To be called SG6, it will be one of the new data centers to be built in the city-state following a three-year moratorium imposed by the government in 2019 as it evaluated how to manage data center growth in a sustainable manner. The moratorium was lifted in 2022.
SG6 will be part of Singapore's pilot Data Centre – Call for Application (DC-CFA) scheme, which will see the establishment of four new sustainable data centers in the city over the next few years. In addition to Equinix, the other data center operators selected to join the scheme in July 2023 are GDS, Microsoft and a consortium of AirTrunk and ByteDance. Together, the new facilities are expected to bring a total of 80MW of new capacity to Singapore.
According to Equinix, SG6 will incorporate several sustainable features into its design, including lower carbon building materials and advanced liquid cooling technology that will provide the efficient heat transfer required for high-density hardware such as GPUs.
The data center operator also signed a renewable power purchase agreement with Sembcorp Industries in Singapore to support the addition of new renewable energy capacity to the local electric grid.
In addition, Equinix worked with the National University of Singapore's College of Design and Engineering to evaluate various types of alternative power supplies and their reliability, cost, operating conditions and environmental impact. The goal was to help data center operators make an informed decision when implementing alternative power supply systems.
Targeting AI workloads
According to Equinix, its new SG6 will be specifically built to handle compute-intensive AI workloads.
"SG6 sets a new benchmark in our approach to driving digital and AI transformation. As compute-intensive workloads continue to grow, the demand for capacity will also rise, and Equinix is equipped to support these next-generation workloads," said Yee May Leong, managing director, Singapore at Equinix, in a statement.
"By integrating the latest sustainability innovations, our new AI-ready data center enables businesses to establish their digital infrastructure both responsibly and sustainably'' she added.
SG6 will be added to Equinix's global network of interconnected data centers. It will facilitate low-latency, high-bandwidth connections between AI resources and data sources, enabling efficient AI workflows across multiple geographic locations.
Equinix said this capability will be particularly valuable to organizations with stringent latency requirements, or those looking to deploy AI at scale across a diverse set of infrastructures.
SG6 follows the data center operator's previously announced planned market entry into the Philippines in July and Thailand in October.
The company currently has 59 data centers across 15 major metropolitan areas in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
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