Social media giant Facebook and the Singapore government are joining forces to fund a USD 17 million project to address the need to boost the number of sustainable data centers built in tropical climates.
A state-of-the-art testbed facility will be set up in the National University of Singapore to promote the co-creation and demonstration of such advanced cooling technologies. The new Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed (STDCT) – the first of its kind in the tropics – will serve as an innovation hub for academia and industry to work together to future-proof the region’s data center industry. This program will see researchers develop and demonstrate energy-efficient cooling technologies to achieve breakthroughs in the tropical data center environment. The testbed facility is expected to be operational by 1 October 2021.
This program is jointly funded by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) and anchor industry partner Facebook. The research will be led by the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, and supported by Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). Five other industry partners involved are Ascenix Pte Ltd, CoolestDC Pte Ltd, Keppel Data Centres, New Media Express Pte Ltd, and Red Dot Analytics Pte Ltd.
Maintaining controlled environments requires high energy consumption, resulting in high cost and carbon emissions – particularly for tropical countries like Singapore, which supplies about 60% of the data centers located in South East Asia. Data centers in Singapore consume almost 7% of the country’s total energy needs, a figure projected to reach 12% by 2030. Thus, there is an increasing need to reduce power consumption and carbon footprint in packing more computing power within the same floor area, while developing solutions to sustain the cooling demands of data centers.
(Source: NUS News)