Southeast Asia's AI race has a megawatt opportunity

Giampiero Frisio09-25

Across Southeast Asia, governments and operators are competing for land, grid connections and new data centre capacity.In the race to build AI infrastructure, not every megawatt is equal. What matters...

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What matters...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/artificial-intelligence/southeast-asias-ai-race-has-megawatt-opportunity?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=Tiger_Brokers_app_RSS\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"QTOC","symbol_name":"Innovator Growth Accelerated Plus ETF - October","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/artificial-intelligence/southeast-asias-ai-race-has-megawatt-opportunity?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=Tiger_Brokers_app_RSS","article_id":"2670944042","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":[],"rights":{"source":"edge_highlight","url":"https://www.theedgesingapore.com/digitaledge/artificial-intelligence/southeast-asias-ai-race-has-megawatt-opportunity?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=Tiger_Brokers_app_RSS","rn_cache_url":null,"directOrigin":true},"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2670944042","pubTimestamp":1790269200,"columns":[],"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"edge_highlight","name":"Edge"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Across Southeast Asia, governments and operators are competing for land, grid connections and new data centre capacity.","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"theedgesingapore.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"QTOC":"Innovator Growth Accelerated Plus ETF - October","VGT":"信息技术ETF-Vanguard","VTHR":"Vanguard Russell 3000 ETF","BK4588":"碎股","AIPO":"Defiance AI and Power Infrastructure ETF","BK4585":"ETF&股票定投概念","ARTY":"ISHARES FUTURE AI & TECH ETF","CHAT":"ROUNDHILL GENERATIVE AI & TECHNOLOGY ETF","BK4017":"黄金","DC":"Dakota Gold Corp","AGIX":"通用人工智能 ETF-AGIX"},"translate_title":"东南亚的人工智能竞赛拥有巨大的机遇","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"VTHR":1.5,"QTOC":1.5,"VGT":0.7,"ARTY":1.5,"CHAT":1.5,"DC":1,"AGIX":1.5,"AIPO":1.5},"content_text":"Across Southeast Asia, governments and operators are competing for land, grid connections and new data centre capacity.In the race to build AI infrastructure, not every megawatt is equal. What matters is how much computing capacity each one can support. Across Southeast Asia, governments and operators are competing for land, grid connections and new data centre capacity. All three matter. But as those resources become harder to secure, a different question comes into focus.\nHow much more computing capacity can we extract from the power and space available to us? Next-generation AI chips will require Direct Current power architectures. Today, very few companies have technology that can support this. ABB is the first to share a portfolio roadmap that will enable more sites in Asia to introduce AI efficiently.\nYou cannot build your way out of the constraint\nSingapore has confronted this question earlier than most. Its Green Data Centre Roadmap aims to unlock at least 300MW of additional capacity while driving greater energy efficiency and green energy use. New data centres must meet stringent efficiency requirements, including power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25 or better at full IT load.\nAt the same time, demand keeps growing. Singapore's land and power constraints have helped push data-centre expansion into neighbouring Johor, Malaysia, just across the border. The lesson is clear: when digital demand outpaces the physical infrastructure needed to support it, capacity looks for somewhere else to go.\nThe pressure extends beyond Southeast Asia. In Japan, policymakers are increasingly considering the location of data centres alongside power infrastructure and renewable energy resources. Hong Kong, meanwhile, is opening new land for data centre development, including the 10-hectare Sandy Ridge Data Facility Cluster.\nAcross Asia, the constraint is harder to ignore. AI growth needs land, power and grid capacity, and none is unlimited. Hedging locations to move around capacity does not remove that reality.\nAs AI infrastructure spreads across Southeast Asia, pressure on land, grids and energy systems will follow. The race for AI capacity will continue to intensify while the invisible race for efficiency has already begun.\nAI redefines efficiency\nLeading AI racks are expected to reach around 600kW in 2027 and approach 1MW later in the decade. That increase in power density changes the equation for data centres. At those densities, power is no longer simply a utility supplied to a data centre. It determines how much compute a site can accommodate.\nFor years, the industry has worked hard to improve PUE. That remains important. But AI is exposing what PUE cannot tell us. When the grid connection itself becomes the constraint, how much computing capacity can we get from every megawatt available? That requires us to look at how electricity gets to the processor.\nThe power distribution architecture has to change\nSolar panels generate direct current (DC), batteries store it, and servers consume it. Yet much of the power infrastructure connecting them still relies on alternating current (AC). As a result, electricity is often converted between AC and DC multiple times before it reaches the processor. Each conversion introduces losses and requires equipment and space.\nAt lower power densities, we could afford that conversion loss. At AI scale, it will be increasingly untenable.\nOur analysis of a 100MW AI hyperscale facility suggests that centralised power conversion using DC distribution could improve grid-to-rack efficiency by more than 5%. That could release 5-6MW for IT load while freeing roughly 3,000sqm of floor space.\nAt AI scale, more than 5% is a major operational and economic lever. It means more available power can reach IT loads and more of the site can be dedicated to compute, increasing the productive capacity of infrastructure that is already constrained by power, land, and grid access.\nThat changes the economics of efficiency. In a capacity-constrained market, efficiency is no longer simply about lowering the energy bill. Efficiency is no longer only about reducing energy consumption and operating costs.  It can determine how much computing capacity a site can support within its available power and physical footprint.\nThe answer is not All-DC\nAC will remain the backbone of regional grids and will continue to serve many data centre loads. The more practical direction is hybrid, using proven AC systems where it works best, while increasingly using DC within high-density AI facilities. What matters is how efficiently power moves through the entire system, from source to rack.\nThis is the thinking behind ABB's Infinitus DC portfolio, the industry's first source-to-rack DC offering designed for AI data centres. It brings power conversion, protection and distribution into a more integrated DC architecture, reducing unnecessary conversion stages and the losses that come with them.\nBut the bigger point is not DC for DC's sake. The goal is to make better, more efficient use of the power and space available for AI compute. That is why decisions about power architecture are not only an engineering conversation but also a business one.\nKeeping pace with technological change\nStandards for DC systems are quickly evolving as the industry works to enable interoperability, safety and reliability while driving globally consistent standards. The industry needs more skilled people to design and operate these complex systems. And lastly, but most importantly, operators must have the confidence that the equipment can work seamlessly together, safely and reliably.\nThese may sound like technical issues, but they are increasingly business ones. Technology can move faster than the standards, skills, and collaboration needed to deploy it at scale, making industry coordination increasingly important.\nDecisions made over the next two or three years could shape the standards for power architectures and AI infrastructure well into the 2030s.\nDesigning the journey ahead\nPolicymakers should support standards development that allows electrical systems to evolve. Operators should judge projects not only by PUE or installed megawatts, but by how much compute and resilience they can deliver.\nSoutheast Asia will still need greater renewable generation, stronger grids and additional data centre capacity. But finding more power is only half the AI infrastructure challenge. The other half is getting more compute from the power and space already available.\nThe AI race has just started and will be won in the electrical architecture that powers it.\nGiampiero Frisio is President, ABB Electrification","kind":"highlight","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":false,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"isVideo":false,"video":null,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"need_login_tip":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"isLaohu8Offline":false,"tenantId":"TBGLOBAL","deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.50.1","shortVersion":"4.50.1","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/2670944042","isCrawlerRequest":true}