Singapore will impose Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) requirements on all data centres – new and existing – in the proposed Digital Infrastructure Act (DIA) expected to be tabled in Parliament later this year, said Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information yesterday.
No PUE figures were mentioned however although it is understood from his speech that the government, namely the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), had consulted industry stakeholders to come up with requirements that are “practicable and consistent with international benchmarks”.
According to Tan, the baseline energy efficiency requirements are essential to ensure data centers in Singapore are energy efficient and sustainable to support the growing demands of the nation’s digital economy, particularly with the current push for AI adoption.
For existing data centers, Tan alluded to the Energy Efficiency Grant for the DC sector to help operators refresh their IT equipment to more energy-efficient models. Additionally, the IT Energy Efficiency standard released in Jun 2025 was intended to guide data center operators on selecting energy-efficient IT equipment and operating them more efficiently.
The minister, in his speech, also alluded to existing data centers “refreshing their technologies and IT equipment over time to meet the DIA requirements.”
The energy efficiency grant and standards were initiated following the launch of Singapore’s Green Data Centre Roadmap in May 2024 to chart a sustainable growth pathway and turn Singapore’s resource constraints into opportunity.
In addition to the PUE requirements, the DIA will also establish requirements to enhance the resilience and security of major cloud service providers (CSPs) and the data centers, Tan said.
“The DIA will require major CSPs and data centers to implement measures to manage security risks, minimise disruptions, and ensure business continuity. These include ex-ante requirements based on the Advisory Guidelines for Data Centres and Cloud Providers released last year, as well as ex-post incident reporting requirements,” the senior minister added.
The DIA was proposed to enhance the security and resilience of critical digital infrastructure (CII) such as data centres following several major outages in the island nation in 2024. It was originally scheduled to be tabled in Parliament last year.
Tan was speaking at the launch of Singtel Digital InfraCo – NVIDIA Centre of Excellence for Applied AI.