The world’s second-most expensive place to pour a data hall
Building a data centre in Singapore cost US$14.53 per watt in 2025 — the second-highest figure of any market in the world, behind only Tokyo, according to Turner & Townsend’s data-centre construction cost index. The year before it was US$13.80. A single 60 MW facility at that rate is a construction programme approaching a billion Singapore dollars, and the megawatts now being released — at least 200 MW under the DC-CFA2 allocation round, on top of the 300 MW of the Green Data Centre Roadmap — will each pass through the same funnel of contractors. The policy story of caps and green gates is told in the companion article on Singapore’s data-centre capacity. This one is about who actually does the work.
Four layers between an empty plot and a live rack
A data centre is procured in layers, and the money divides accordingly. The main build — piling, structure, envelope — is conventional construction, delivered by large builders and sitting inside a national construction market that reached S$50.5 billion of demand in 2025 and is forecast by the Building and Construction Authority at S$47–53 billion for 2026. The mechanical and electrical (M&E) fit-out is where a data centre stops being an ordinary building: switchboards, chillers, pipework, fire suppression and controls typically absorb the majority of the capital cost. Inside that sits the critical-power and cooling layer — uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), generators, busway, computer-room air handling and, increasingly, liquid cooling. Finally comes commissioning: the staged testing regime that proves, before a single customer server arrives, that the facility survives the failures it was designed for. Turner & Townsend notes that AI-ready designs have pushed capital expenditure up by 20–40%, driven by advanced cooling and heavier electrical infrastructure — which means the specialist layers are growing faster than the shell around them.
The builders and the integrated M&E houses
The main-build and fit-out tiers overlap in Singapore, because the regulator grades both. The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) registers contractors by workhead — air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation, electrical engineering, integrated building services — and data-centre owners read those grades the way they read a balance sheet. Kienta Engineering Construction, a Singapore builder that names data-centre construction as a core expertise across greenfield and brownfield work, holds BCA L6 registrations in ACMV, electrical engineering and integrated building services, positioning it across both the main build and the specialist white-space fit-out. At the larger end, Wah Loon Engineering — one of Singapore’s more established integrated M&E houses, now part of France’s VINCI Energies — self-performs mechanical, electrical, ACMV and fire-protection packages and is active in data-centre M&E. The acquisition itself is a signal: global engineering groups are buying into Singapore’s data-centre delivery capability rather than building it from scratch.
Critical power: the busway, UPS and switchgear trade
Every AI rack ends at a busbar. Power distribution inside a hall — busway and busduct, switchboards, UPS systems, standby generation — is a trade of its own, and Singapore has genuine depth in it. LKH Projects Distribution supplies and installs busway from low voltage to high voltage, with in-house design, testing and commissioning, and lists data-centre projects among its work. Citec International designs and sizes N+1 UPS systems with load assessment, battery monitoring, harmonic filtering and heat-load testing of the power-and-cooling envelope. Canatec runs modular UPS systems from 10 to 500 kVA with hot-swappable modules alongside its cooling lines. The vocabulary of the trade — N+1 redundancy, static transfer, battery autonomy — is the vocabulary of uptime: a data centre sells continuity, and this layer is where continuity is engineered.
Cooling is where the money is moving
The shift to AI has made cooling the fastest-changing package on any Singapore project. Traditional computer-room air conditioning is giving way to in-row units, rear-door heat exchangers, coolant distribution units and direct-to-chip liquid cooling — plumbing, in effect, arriving inside the rack. Citec supplies floor-standing, ceiling-mounted and fan-array room units plus in-row and in-rack direct cooling that holds temperature within about one degree, backed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of airflow. Canatec fields three precision-cooling lines plus liquid-cooling infrastructure — CDUs, rear-door heat exchangers, fan walls and direct-to-chip components — with leak and environmental monitoring. In a tropical market chasing a power usage effectiveness of 1.3 or below, this layer decides whether a project clears the regulatory gate at all.
Commissioning: the exam before the tenants arrive
The decisive trade is the last one. Commissioning teams take a finished facility through staged testing — factory tests, installation checks, individual system start-up, integrated systems testing under full simulated load — deliberately failing chillers and pulling breakers to prove the redundancy works. For hyperscale and colocation clients, the integrated test is contractual: no pass, no handover, no revenue. It is exacting work, and it is where M&E houses and critical-power specialists earn repeat business.
The honest caveat, and the pipeline
The caveat is capacity of a different kind. Turner & Townsend reports that specialised equipment and the skilled labour for advanced cooling remain in short supply, extending lead times — and Singapore’s construction sector is competing for the same M&E engineers as Changi Terminal 5 and the public housing programme. Costs rose 5% year on year even before the AI premium. The buildout is funded and permitted; the binding constraint is people and kit.
For the firms on the record, that is the opportunity. Each allocated megawatt is years of contracted work for builders like Kienta, M&E integrators like Wah Loon, and power-and-cooling specialists like Citec International, Canatec and LKH Projects Distribution. The full set is on the data-centre construction and power systems capability pages.