APAC Data Centre Weekly

Editor’s note

Singapore's 200MW Beats Anyone's Gigawatt

Lee Heggan · Editor · Week of 24 August 2026

Singapore handed out 200MW this week and it was the most solid news in the region. Four operators, 50MW each, on Jurong Island — the DC-CFA2 tranche launched last December, now placed. Go back to 2023: the pilot round awarded roughly 80MW in total, with GDS taking about 20MW at Jalan Buroh and an AirTrunk–ByteDance consortium among the winners. Three years later the tranche is 2.5x the size, it comes attached to a site, and officials are already talking about a third round.

Size that against what Singapore is actually building. The island runs circa 1.05–1.1GW live — still APAC's largest live metro — with only 160MW under construction, under 2% of the region's UC total. So this single award is bigger than the entire live build book. In a market where the permission is the asset, an allocation sits closer to funded than most gigawatt announcements will ever get. The exit plumbing is lining up behind it too: SDC Capital is reported to be weighing a US$1bn Singapore REIT IPO.

Vietnam went the other way. STT GDC has backed out of its planned Vietnamese project. In May 2024 the STT GDC–VNG JV for a 60MW Ho Chi Minh City facility was the first serious international-platform bet on that market. Two years on, it's off. Vietnam sits at circa 60MW live against 443MW under construction and 616MW planned — a UC book seven times the installed base, in a country that also lost international capacity to cable faults this week. Evolution did lease 50,000 sqm in HCMC for a 52MW build, which is genuine progress and nearly matches everything Vietnam has running today. But one exit out of two marquee foreign bets is a mark on the board, and we should say so.

Australia agreed a national data centre framework this week with the energy rules left open — following the household water plan we flagged a fortnight ago. AEMO now puts data centre demand at 34TWh by 2035-36. Against that, Zerra filed for a 1.44GW, A$14.5bn Queensland campus, with applications in for 200MW in Melbourne and 81MW at St Leonards. Australia already carries the region's biggest build book: about 1.6GW live, 2,275MW under construction, a pipeline near 11.5GW. Undated gigawatt proposals don't move those numbers. The framework, and whatever the energy rules turn out to say, will.

Smaller but telling: Empyrion closed financing with E.Sun Bank for a 7MW Taipei site. Taiwan has 290MW live and 43MW under construction, near the bottom of the regional table. A single 7MW facility drawing local bank debt tells you more about Taiwan's next two years than any regional forecast does.

Sources this week