Increasingly challenging to find suitable land for data centres: Keppel CEO

Loh Chin Hua says the company has been exploring power banking to boost efficiency

Finding land with the right connectivity and access to water to build data centres is becoming increasingly challenging, said Keppel’s chief executive officer Loh Chin Hua on Tuesday (Oct 28).

“The grids are really very congested, so... we have been looking at power banking,” he said, explaining this as “looking for large enough pieces of land where we can build not one data centre, but a data centre park to make it more efficient”.

His remarks came at an event organised by Univers, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for energy, on the sidelines of Singapore International Energy Week.

Finding the right piece of land is so important that Keppel has developed an AI model that can map out sites with access to power and water, and also hyperscalers’ locations, he added.

“With that, we can actually show or illustrate where the lightly landing zones (and hot spots are). And we will then obviously look to buy land in those places.”

Likewise, Energy Market Authority assistant chief executive Low Xin Wei said that grid-planning for a future economy enabled by AI requires a new paradigm.

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This means “some degree of new thinking around co-locating, co-siting them... to be able to figure out where these sweet spots around resources are, and to be able to plan accordingly”, she said, at another panel at the event.

Previously, developing advanced industrial parks was based on a plug-and-play model, where essential infrastructure such as roads, power, security, water supply and connectivity were already in place.

“What’s wrong for us to expect that... for AI data centres, for there to be plug-and-play infrastructure for (them)?” she added.

“Sometimes, getting water to a point is easy, getting workers to a point is easy, (but) getting electricity to a point is actually not easy... Power is not cheap.”