Keppel Begins Construction on Singapore’s First Floating Data Center
April 24, 2026
Keppel Begins Construction on Singapore’s First Floating Data Center
Keppel has officially started construction on its pioneering floating data center project in Singapore, marking a significant step in addressing the city-state’s well-known constraints on land, energy, and water for digital infrastructure. The announcement, made as part of the company’s Q1 2026 earnings update, confirms that the project has moved from the planning phase into active development.
Keppel first explored the concept of a floating data center park in 2019 and secured regulatory approval for the initiative in 2023. The 25MW facility, funded by the Keppel Data Centre Fund II and already committed to a global hyperscale customer, is scheduled to go live in 2028. According to Keppel’s 2025 annual report, the project is a “first-of-its-kind” endeavor that “demonstrates a practical and scalable approach to addressing land, energy, and water constraints often faced by data centers.”
The modular floating development will consist of a four-story, 19.2MW waterborne module paired with shoreside infrastructure. It will occupy approximately 9,870 square meters of land and 7,580 square meters of sea space at 25 Loyang Crescent, an industrial site previously owned by oil company Toll and now being sold to real estate firm CapitaLand. Both Keppel and CapitaLand count Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek as a major investor. The facility will be cooled using seawater, a natural advantage of its offshore location.
Keppel is not alone in pursuing the floating data center concept. US-based Nautilus Data Technologies, founded in 2014, built a 6.5MW data center on a floating barge in Stockton, California, which was launched in 2021 and later put up for sale at $45 million in late 2024. French startup Denv-R has deployed a small containerized data center on a floating platform in Nantes, while a consortium of Japanese companies recently announced a pilot offshore floating data center near Yokohama, powered by solar and battery storage. Japanese shipping giant Mitsui O.S.K. Lines has also partnered with Kinetics and Hitachi to develop a floating data center platform. Google filed a patent for a similar concept as early as 2008, proposing sea-based data centers that would use wave energy and seawater cooling, though it has yet to deploy any such facility.
In addition to the floating project, Keppel announced plans to begin construction of its Keppel DC SGP 9 data center in Singapore in mid-2026, following an extended land use approval earlier this year. That facility will be the company’s third at the Keppel Data Centre Campus on Genting Lane. The recently completed KDC SGP 7 spans 186,610 square feet across seven stories, while the eight-story KDC SGP 8 totals 290,040 square feet, both finished in early 2025.
Source: datacenterdynamics
