Summary
- DayOne has secured a four-year S$530m green loan from DBS, OCBC, and UOB for its first Singapore data centre.
- The 20MW facility will trial on-site solid oxide fuel-cell generation and use a hybrid air- and liquid-cooling design.
- The project provides a technical comparator for European markets exploring on-site generation and new cooling architectures under grid constraints.
DayOne has secured a S$530m green loan for a 20MW Singapore data centre that will combine hybrid cooling, building-integrated solar, and a proof-of-concept trial of on-site solid oxide fuel-cell generation.
DayOne is developing the facility in western Singapore, with operations expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027.
The four-year financing has been provided by DBS, OCBC, and UOB, which are acting as joint mandated lead arrangers, bookrunners, and green-loan coordinators. DBS is also acting as facility agent.
The project broke ground in July 2025 and will provide 20MW of data centre capacity.
Its power architecture is the most distinctive part of the development. DayOne plans to run a proof of concept using solid oxide fuel cells, which the company says could make the facility the first Singapore data centre to use the technology for on-site generation.
Solid oxide fuel cells generate electricity electrochemically rather than through conventional combustion. They can operate on different fuels depending on system design and have been discussed as a potential route towards lower-emission or hydrogen-based power for data centres.
A proof of concept is not the same as a full replacement for grid electricity or conventional backup generation. The practical value will depend on fuel availability, conversion efficiency, emissions, uptime, cost, maintenance, and the proportion of site load the system can support.
That makes the trial particularly relevant to grid-constrained data centre markets. Operators around the world are examining whether more generation can be placed behind the meter as large campuses struggle to secure timely network connections.
Europe faces the same engineering question even though the regulatory and energy-market context differs from Singapore. Ireland, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands are among markets where power availability increasingly shapes where and when additional data centre capacity can be built.
On-site generation can reduce some dependency on the grid, but it creates its own requirements around fuel supply, emissions, maintenance, redundancy, and electrical integration. A system that helps with capacity still has to meet the reliability standards expected of critical infrastructure.
The Singapore facility will also combine air and liquid cooling. That hybrid approach reflects the mixed thermal environment emerging in modern data centres, where conventional servers may remain air cooled while higher-density AI equipment shifts towards direct liquid cooling.
Supporting both methods adds flexibility, but also requires careful integration of mechanical systems, heat rejection, controls, pumps, and water loops.
DayOne is additionally incorporating building-integrated photovoltaic generation. Solar output will represent only one part of the energy mix for a 20MW facility, but it adds another distributed generation source alongside the fuel-cell trial.
The project received provisional BCA Green Mark Platinum certification in December 2025, and the banks are financing it under a green-loan structure.
As with other sustainability-linked infrastructure financing, the engineering performance ultimately matters more than the label. The operational data from the completed facility will determine how much electricity the on-site systems supply, how the hybrid cooling architecture performs under different IT loads, and whether the technologies materially alter grid demand or energy efficiency.
The combination is a useful comparator for Europe because it brings several developing data centre strategies into one building: alternative on-site generation, high-density liquid cooling, conventional air cooling, solar generation, and sustainability-linked financing.
European operators are unlikely to copy the Singapore design wholesale. Grid codes, climate, energy pricing, fuel availability, planning rules, and customer requirements differ significantly between markets.
The broader engineering pressure is nevertheless familiar. New compute demand is growing faster than some electricity networks can accommodate, and higher rack densities are changing the thermal load inside the facility at the same time.
That forces developers to work on the supply and demand sides of the building simultaneously — finding more ways to secure electricity while redesigning how that electricity and the resulting heat move through the data centre.
DayOne’s 20MW project is relatively modest beside the multi-hundred-megawatt campuses now proposed for AI, but its operating results should provide evidence on whether combining fuel cells and hybrid cooling can make a meaningful contribution to that wider infrastructure problem.
