On its annual earnings call, Keppel Data Centres announced that it had received regulatory approval to build a floating data centre in Singapore.
Keppel issued responses to shareholder questions that included the statement: “We continue to make progress on our Floating Data Centre Module. We have received approval from the regulatory authorities to proceed, and are currently in negotiations with the site owner for project deployment.”
The floating data centre park (FDCP) is envisioned as an ‘environmentally friendly and resource-efficient way to meet the expanding needs of the digital economy’. The novel facility will harness the expertise of the Keppel Group to develop a solution that alleviates land, water and energy constraints of traditional data centres.
The primary advantage of a floating data centre is that it eliminates the need to purchase property, which is a key barrier to data centre construction in high-demand, limited-land markets like Singapore. The country is not unfamiliar with floating buildings, as Apple opened its first store to sit directly on water in Singapore.
The floating data centre will also use seawater for cooling. This is an energy-efficient solution that also reduces the high water usage generally found in land-based data centres.
The concept for the FDCP was first announced in 2019, following the company’s $10 million investment in Nautilus Data Technologies in 2017. Nautilus has constructed several floating data centres globally and recently announced two new facilities to be deployed in the waters off Los Angeles and Marseilles.
The long-term vision was to build an entire marina of data centre facilities on a floating campus, all sharing a power generator. The marina would be comprised of up to 20 barges, each housing a 10MW data center, connected to one another by floating walkways.
In 2020, Keppel signed two memoranda of understanding with Toll Group and Royal Volpak to review the feasibility of the concept. Specifically, the two groups were exploring the possibility of developing the campus at the Loyand Offshore Supply Base owned by Toll Group.
The FDCP will be built on a modular design, so that it can be scaled quickly to meet growing demand. A modular design also makes it easy to exchange and recycle equipment that becomes broken or worn out.
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