What Jurong Island Can Teach Us About the Future of AI Infrastructure

Singapore is taking a page from its own industrial playbook to solve one of the most pressing challenges of the AI era: how to power data centres at scale without running out of land, energy, or carbon budget. The answer, it turns out, is already sitting on Jurong Island.

In October 2025, Singapore earmarked nearly 300 hectares on Jurong Island for new energy systems and roughly 20 hectares for what will be the country's largest low-carbon, AI-ready data centre park — capable of hosting up to 700 megawatts of compute capacity. The move comes as global electricity demand from data centres is projected to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, roughly equivalent to Japan's entire electricity consumption today.

Writing for The Edge Singapore, Michael Goh — VP and GM for EMEA and APAC at Iron Mountain — draws a direct parallel between how Jurong Island became one of the world's most significant petrochemical clusters without any oil or gas reserves, and how Singapore can apply the same engineering-around-constraints mindset to AI infrastructure. The island today generates more than S$90 billion in value annually and accounts for a quarter of Singapore's manufacturing output, anchored by shared energy systems and integrated infrastructure that no single company could build alone.

Goh's analysis identifies three reinforcing pillars for Jurong Island's next chapter. The first is circularity — designing systems where LNG cold energy, low-carbon fuels, and shared thermal infrastructure support data centre cooling, industrial operations, and emissions reduction simultaneously. The second is data stewardship, which shifts the conversation from preventing disruption to guaranteeing recovery, treating resilience as a built-in capability rather than a contingency plan. The third is national capability — the recognition that governance-intensive workflows, compliance functions, and regional decision-making roles tend to cluster where institutional confidence and operational assurance are strongest, creating a multiplier effect that extends well beyond the original infrastructure investment.

Why it matters for Singapore: The APAC data centre market (excluding Japan) is on track for 22% CAGR through 2029, with total installed IT power capacity expected to reach 142,600 MW. Markets across Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand are racing to attract hyperscaler investment, but Singapore's Jurong Island model offers something different — a framework that treats land, energy, carbon, and data as a single integrated system. As AI infrastructure becomes a competitive differentiator for economies, the ability to build resilient, low-carbon compute capacity at scale could be Singapore's next Jurong Island story.