Summary

  • Singapore's second data-centre call for application, published 1 December 2025, requires a power usage effectiveness no higher than 1.25 at 100% IT load and defines the ratio as total annual data-centre energy divided by total annual IT-equipment energy.
  • The same three-page document states no commissioning deadline, no reporting return and no penalty for a miss; the minister closing the Digital Infrastructure Bill's second reading in October 2026 said award-supporting commitments could become licence conditions, with commencement expected in 2027.

The number is the easy part. In the joint EDB–IMDA factsheet that launched Singapore's second data-centre call for application on 1 December 2025, the sustainability requirement reads "1.25 (at 100% IT load) or better", and footnote 1 defines the metric: total annual data-centre energy divided by total annual IT-equipment energy (call launch factsheet). Nothing in that sentence is vague. An engineer can put it on a whiteboard and design to it.

The ratio is an annual energy figure, while the requirement is written at 100% IT load. That is a design-point statement about a year of energy, which is exactly what a facility designer needs and exactly what an operator's monthly electricity bill does not measure.

The same factsheet attaches the rest of the entry package. Selected applicants must obtain BCA-IMDA Green Mark for Data Centres 2024 Platinum certification for the proposed facility; IT equipment must meet or exceed SS 715:2025, alongside measures taken with users to optimise equipment utilisation; and at least 50% of proposed capacity must use eligible green-energy pathways. The pathway list — biomethane, low-carbon ammonia or hydrogen, novel fuel cells with carbon capture and storage, and vertical building-integrated or building-applied photovoltaics — is introduced as examples, so it is illustrative rather than closed.

Set against the sector-wide Green Data Centre Roadmap, the call's threshold is the stricter number. One IMDA-hosted copy targets at least 300 MW of additional near-term capacity and aims at PUE at or below 1.3 at 100% IT load across all data centres within ten years (roadmap, first copy). A second copy of the same-titled document adds a potential 200 MW or more beyond that aim and states below 1.3 rather than at or below 1.3 (roadmap, second copy). No revision sequence or supersession notice links the two, so both are reported here as separate documents and neither is adopted as current. Neither states that the call's 1.25 derives from the sector aim.

What the launch factsheet does not contain is the clock. Read end to end, those three pages state no commissioning or delivery deadline, no reporting-return schedule and no consequence for non-performance. That is a finding about one document on 13 November 2026, and it does not establish anything about the terms of any individual award, which sit in instruments I could not open.

The allocation those terms govern is reported, not read. A Straits Times report dated 21 August 2026 states that Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel Data Centres and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres "have each been allocated 50 megawatts of new capacity, allocated selectively through competitive allocation calls tied ..." — and the retained passage stops there (Straits Times, 21 August 2026). The arithmetic closes, 50 × 4 = 200, but it closes inside a single newspaper report; it is not independent corroboration. The Economic Development Board's own media-release page for the selection of four proposals is dated the same day in the search index and is there described as a provisional 200 MW allocation to four operators with a linked factsheet (EDB announcement page). Opening that page returned an anti-bot challenge, so the indexed wording is discovery evidence, not a document I read.

The two documents that would settle it stayed shut. The EDB award factsheet PDF (award factsheet) and IMDA's 2026 press release on the four-operator allocation (IMDA release) both returned access challenges. No recipient-by-recipient allocation, award-specific condition, deadline, return or penalty was read from any regulator document. Keppel Data Centres Holding Pte Ltd appears in the newspaper's list of four recipients and has a directory entry; its own pages returned nothing reachable on Singapore awards, which is a limit on my read, not a finding that it discloses nothing.

On 7 October 2026 the Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information closed the Second Reading of the Digital Infrastructure Bill by describing the layer that is meant to supply what the factsheet omits. Material commitments supporting capacity awards could become licence conditions. "Under the Bill, licensees will report regularly to IMDA." Carbon credits operate as a remedy when a green-energy project fails, not as an elective substitute for committed green energy. The Act is expected to commence in 2027, with implementation staged as detailed requirements are finalised (MDDI closing speech).

That sequencing is the story. The metric binds at entry, in a document anyone can now read. The clock and the return arrive, if they arrive, as licence conditions under a statute not yet in force — and the speech that describes them fixes neither their content, their frequency, nor the sanction attached to a miss.

For a buyer the gap is operational rather than academic. An awarded megawatt is not a commissioned hall. Nothing in the record I read lets a tenant, a lender or a rival bidder distinguish capacity that is lit, capacity that is funded, and capacity that is merely selected. No figure here is converted into floor area, rack count, capital cost or share of national electricity demand, because no inspected document supports such a conversion.

Singapore's water rules show the same shape one stage earlier. The roadmap sets a water-usage target of at most 2.0 cubic metres per megawatt-hour within ten years, measures it as total data-centre water consumption against IT-equipment energy, and points to Water Efficiency Plan submissions to PUB for facilities consuming at least 60,000 cubic metres a year. Those are roadmap expectations, not conditions of this call, and they are written as aims rather than returns.

BTW's only earlier Singapore data-centre report covered an 80.2 MW facility linked to a $1.7bn (SG$2.2bn) green loan, published 7 April 2025. That is earlier reporting on one project's financing; its chronology is not re-argued here, and its capacity belongs to a different arithmetic entirely.

The checkable half of this regime is genuinely checkable: one ratio, two decimal places, a stated formula, a named certification and a quantified green-energy share. The half that decides whether the capacity actually exists is not published in readable form. Until a deadline, a return or a licence condition is dated and printed, an award is a place in a queue whose pace the operator does not control and the public cannot audit.