Singapore launches liquid cooling standard for data centres in tropical climate

[SINGAPORE] Singapore has launched a new standard for data centres on adopting liquid cooling technologies in tropical areas – as demand for artificial intelligence workloads grows across South-east Asia.

The move follows the Republic’s latest award of 200 megawatts in new data capacity, and comes amid growing concerns about these facilities’ large energy and water consumption.

The new standard – dubbed the Singapore Standard (SS) 726 – builds on existing international standards for liquid cooling, while accounting for operational conditions in tropical climates.

It also recommends best practices on measuring and optimising water use, said the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG) in a Thursday (Aug 27) press statement.

Both agencies developed SS 726 through the Singapore Standards Council, in consultation with industry players and experts.

Unlike traditional air cooling, liquid cooling uses fluids to transfer heat from hardware chips, reducing energy consumption at the data centre level by more than 30 per cent.

“However, tropical conditions such as high temperatures and humidity present additional challenges, including equipment corrosion, which can affect cooling efficiency and reliability,” IMDA and EnterpriseSG noted.

The standard addresses these issues with technical guidelines to design and deploy liquid cooling systems, manage potential risks, and integrate liquid cooling with existing air-cooled data centres.

IMDA deputy chief executive Aileen Chia said that liquid cooling is “increasingly important to support the higher power densities required for AI and other advanced computing workloads”.

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The authorities will continue to work with partners to “push the boundaries for data centre energy efficiency”, she added.

As part of a move towards green data centres, Singapore had also previously launched the Tropical Data Centre standard and the Energy Efficiency of Data Centre IT Equipment standard.