Hitachi, SIT to build hybrid AC/DC power testbed for data centres

Rack-level trial to run on SIT microgrid at Punggol campus.

Hitachi and the Singapore Institute of Technology will co-develop a hybrid AC/DC rack-level power distribution testbed for data centres, which the partners said is a first-of-its-kind rack-level testbed in Singapore.

The testbed will interface with SIT Punggol Campus’ multi-energy microgrid, which the release described as the first to be constructed on a university campus in Southeast Asia, integrating solar photovoltaic systems and other distributed energy resources for campus-wide monitoring and optimisation.

The partners stated that the campus will serve as a live test environment under SIT’s Living Lab Network, where they will deploy and evaluate hybrid AC/DC power solutions under real-world operating conditions.

They cited rising digitalisation and AI demand as drivers of increasing data centre energy consumption in Southeast Asia, with computing and cooling needs heightened by tropical climates.

The testbed will evaluate hybrid rack-level approaches, including higher-voltage DC distribution intended to improve efficiency and enable the integration of renewable energy, with findings expected to inform future data centre power architectures.

SIT students will also work with Hitachi’s R&D team on real-world assignments related to hybrid AC/DC systems and renewable integration.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia