The Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed (STDCT) is partnering with PUB, SGTech (Data Centre Chapter) and the Singapore Water Association (SWA) to advance sustainable water solutions for data centres in Singapore as demand for digital infrastructure continues to rise.
Hosted at NUS CDE, STDCT is Singapore’s first tropical data centre testbed, supporting the development and validation of solutions for high-temperature, high-humidity environments. Together, the partners will explore and validate solutions in areas such as water-lite cooling and heat rejection systems, the balance between water usage effectiveness and power usage effectiveness, best practices for tropical data centre operations, and capacity building across the sector. This will also help identify gaps, connect research expertise with industry needs, and support the adoption of practical solutions, with promising technologies undergoing testing and validation at STDCT and other affiliated facilities. Collectively, these efforts can help strengthen water resilience, improve resource efficiency, and support the sustainable growth of data centres in Singapore.
Prof Lee Poh Seng, Head (Mechanical Engineering) and Programme Director (Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed), said, “This partnership marks an important step in advancing water-resilient and sustainable tropical data centres. As AI workloads drive higher power densities and more complex cooling demands, water stewardship must become an integral part of data-centre design and operations. By bringing together public-sector leadership, research expertise and industry deployment pathways, we can accelerate the validation of practical water-saving solutions, strengthen PUE-WUE performance under tropical conditions, and translate credible evidence into scalable practices for Singapore and the region.”
For CDE, this reflects how engineering research can help tackle real-world challenges at the intersection of sustainability, infrastructure and industry transformation. By bringing together academia, government and industry, we hope to support more resilient and resource-efficient data centre operations for Singapore’s future, while contributing solutions that could eventually be applied in other cities and industries facing similar water and sustainability challenges.
