Singapore is world’s most expensive data center rental market

The country reported a record-low vacancy rate for data centers in a 2023 report.

Singapore has the highest rental rates in the world, at US$300 to US$400 per month for a 250- to 500-kilowatt (kW) requirement, reports CBRE in its latest global data center trends report.

The high price did not deter demand however, as the “world’s most power-constrained data center market” only has 4MW of available leasing space, for a record-low vacancy rate of under 2%.

Inventory is expected to remain tight in the near future.

“Limited power supply and high sustainability requirements are the main reasons why Singapore’s inventory is expected to remain tight and colocation pricing to remain elevated over the next few years,” CBRE said in a report. This is despite a 60 MW of potential new capacity to be introduced by the government under the pilot Data Center-Call for Application (DC-CFA) exercise.

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Other challenges include the expectation of more stringent sustainability-related conditions for data center development, which will lead to higher requirements and costs for potential data center operators and investors.

Across Asia-Pacific, data center inventory is rapidly growing at an impressive scale, according to CBRE. Data center inventory is growing rapidly across Asia-Pacific, achieving impressive scale. Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore each now contain over a half-GW of live power capacity. 

Lack of power availability is a key emerging challenge facing operators in some APAC markets. 
A worldwide shortage of available power is inhibiting growth of the global data center market. Sourcing enough power is a top priority of data center operators across North America, Europe, Latin America and APAC.