When technology giants look to build the large datacentres required to power the internet and the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, their primary concern is not necessarily real estate, climate or tax incentives – it’s finding enough electricity.
With Deloitte projecting $800bn worth of datacentre investments in Asia-Pacific by 2030, the availability of power has become the single most decisive factor in the region’s digital economy, according to Jean-Christophe Moureau, senior vice-president for solutions operations at Schneider Electric, a multinational company specialising in digital automation and energy management.
“The criteria for selecting where to build a datacentre today is where we have energy,” he said in a recent interview with Computer Weekly. “And the expansions make it even more difficult, because Microsoft, Google and all the Big Tech companies are looking at developing datacentres but the energy is not there.”
The scale of the challenge is unprecedented: global energy demand for datacentres, which was 460 terawatt-hours in 2022, is expected to reach over 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report.
Across the region, the power squeeze has already affected datacentre buildouts. Moureau noted that in Singapore, a major technology hub, energy limitations have forced delays for projects from companies such as Meta.
“The Singapore government just said, ‘Look, sorry guys, we don’t have energy for you before 2028’,” he added.
Against this backdrop, more datacentre operators are taking power generation into their own hands, investing in on-site generators, microgrid architectures and battery energy storage systems. In the US, major players are exploring dedicated energy parks and small modular reactors to secure a steady power supply.
Greenfield builds
In markets with untapped power potential, datacentre operators and hyperscalers are eyeing greenfield builds.
In India, for example, multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries is investing $109.8bn to build AI datacentres, while Microsoft is slated to open its fourth and largest datacentre region in the subcontinent later this year.
The Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, has also become a datacentre hotspot, with developers increasingly proposing gigawatt-scale mega-campuses backed by sovereign wealth funds.
Moureau noted that while new investors can “put a billion on the table in five minutes”, they lack a deep, technical understanding of datacentre operations, relying on engineering partners to translate capital into viable infrastructure.
Optimising datacentre efficiency
The power crunch is driving the industry to optimise datacentre efficiency. At Schneider Electric, engineers are trying to tear down traditional silos of datacentre construction.
Historically, cooling systems, IT infrastructure and electrical distribution were designed independently, but today, they must be deeply integrated and digitally monitored to shave off every possible kilowatt of wasted energy.
One promising development is direct current (DC) power. While much of the world runs on alternating current (AC) power, converting AC to DC results in significant energy loss.
Some players, such as ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), are piloting DC-powered datacentres – a move Moureau believes could bring significant efficiency gains, drawing on his own background managing DC energy systems for submarines.
On a macro level, geopolitical and supply chain hurdles loom large. The transition to green energy has been uneven, and the energy crisis sparked by geopolitical conflicts has led some countries to reopen coal-fired power plants. Moureau called the return to coal “the biggest failure of strategy we can face today”, adding that sustainability must remain the industry’s north star, relying more on solar energy, battery storage and microgrids.
The biggest impediment to datacentre expansion, however, is human capital. The specialised nature of modern datacentres has created a severe labour shortage that threatens to slow development just as much as a lack of electricity.
“We talk about energy and a lot of things, but we never talk about people,” said Moureau. “To find a cooling expert in the market is not easy. Piping is not mathematical; it’s heuristic. You need years of experience. Just try to find good welders.”
Read more about datacentres in APAC
- With AI spurring gigawatt-scale datacentre builds across APAC, Ciena is deploying ultra-fast, energy-efficient optical networking and AI-driven automation to ensure AI services can reach consumers.
- Digital Realty’s CTO talks up the pace of AI silicon innovation, the growth of inferencing workloads, and why boasting about datacentre megawatts misses the point.
- The APAC region is leading a global datacentre expansion, but surging energy demands and the risk of outages will require datacentre operators to adopt proactive strategies to ensure a resilient and sustainable digital future.
- At Gitex Asia 2025, industry leaders discuss how the computational demands of advanced AI models are forcing a rethink of datacentre power, cooling and networking infrastructure.
