A port built for a number no port has ever handled
Tuas Port is designed to move 65 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) a year when it is complete in the 2040s — half as much again as the roughly 44.5 million TEU PSA Singapore handled in 2025, and more than any single port on earth handles today. The project assembles that capacity on 1,337 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea at Singapore’s western tip, roughly 3,300 football fields, carrying 66 deep-water berths along 26 kilometres of quay. It is already, by PSA’s description, the world’s largest fully automated container terminal — and most of it has not yet been built.
Four phases, staged over two decades
The build is phased so the port earns while it grows. Phase 1 reclaimed 294 hectares behind an 8.6-kilometre seawall, work completed in November 2021; it carries 21 deep-water berths and is planned to reach its full 20 million TEU annual capacity when fully operational in 2027. Phase 2’s reclamation began in March 2018, with its caisson fabrication finished in April 2022 and a 9.1-kilometre seawall. Phases 3 and 4 follow, with Phase 3 in planning.
The engineering signature is the caisson: a hollow concrete box roughly the height of a ten-storey building and about 15,000 tonnes, sunk onto the seabed to form the wharf line. Phase 1 used 221 of them; Phase 2 used 227. Building quay walls from caissons rather than driven piles let much of the structure be fabricated on land, faster and with less marine work — and reused dredged and excavated material as fill.
The automation is the point, not the garnish
Tuas runs on a fleet of more than 200 battery-electric automated guided vehicles (AGVs) shuttling containers between quay and yard around the clock, coordinated over a private 5G network, with electrified automated yard cranes stacking the boxes and operations supervised remotely from the Tuas Port Control Centre. PSA expects to more than double the AGV fleet through the later phases. In 2025 the operation ran with a workforce of only around 500 people — the automation lifts throughput per metre of quay and per hectare of yard, which matters more in Singapore than anywhere, because land is the binding constraint. The port is also planned to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and electrified equipment is part of how.
The design removes a cost older ports cannot escape: inter-terminal haulage. Today a transhipment box landed at one Singapore terminal may be trucked across town to catch its connecting vessel at another. In a single consolidated yard, that journey disappears.
The ramp so far has been fast
The first berths opened in September 2022 with three in operation. By February 2025 eleven berths were running, and the port crossed 10 million TEU handled cumulatively — a quick climb for a facility still mostly under construction. The national numbers give the context: PSA Singapore moved 44.5 million TEU in 2025, up more than 8% on the year and a record, so Tuas is scaling into a port system already operating at the top of its range. Each new berth at Tuas adds capacity the city terminals will progressively hand over.
Why the city terminals are closing
Tuas is a consolidation as much as an expansion. PSA’s container operations at Tanjong Pagar, Keppel and Brani are scheduled to move to Tuas by 2027, with Pasir Panjang following by the 2040s. The city terminals sit on some of the most valuable waterfront land in Asia; vacating them releases the site for the Greater Southern Waterfront redevelopment while the port gains a single, contiguous yard next to Jurong Island’s cargo base and the western industrial estates. One location, one traffic system, no split operations — the physics of transhipment favour it.
What could bend the curve
The honest caveat is that 65 million TEU is a design ceiling, not a forecast. The build-out to the 2040s will be paced against demand, and transhipment demand is footloose: Malaysia’s Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas compete for the same boxes at lower cost, and a prolonged trade downturn would slow the phasing rather than the ambition. Singapore’s bet is that reliability, connectivity to some 600 ports and automated productivity keep the cargo coming — a bet the record 2025 throughput supports but does not settle.
For the industrial layer around the port — the yards, equipment specialists and logistics operators that make it work — see the Marine, Offshore & Port and Logistics & Supply Chain sector hubs on the record.