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Short abstract:

The workers that build, operate, and conduct research about data centres in Singapore often come from neighbouring countries, all of which are well-versed in the materialities of the tropical. How do tropical specificities intersect with the innovations in internet infrastructures?

Long abstract:

The problem of heat in data centres have gained increasing media and public scrutiny in recent years. As a tropical country, Singapore’s climate presents a natural barrier to the use of free cooling, thus resulting in the data centres’ higher energy consumptions. In response to the environmental impact of data centres, the Singapore government imposed a moratorium from 2019 to 2022, and upon its lifting, requires new data centres to be greener. Much of the ‘green turn’ across data centres involves the use of liquid cooling, which has been touted as more energy efficient than the air cooling methods traditionally used in the industry. However, the need for tropical standards remain debated. With ‘universal’ standards set by global organisations such as ASHRAE and OCP, what is the value of ‘local’ or ‘regional’ standards for an ’objective’ measurement of temperature?

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with data centre liquid cooling experts based in Singapore, I try to understand how they perceive and learn about ‘universality’. Data centres are very much transnational entities – the workers that build, operate, and conduct research about data centres in Singapore often come from neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, India, and China, all of which are well-versed in the materialities of the tropical. How do tropical specificities intersect with the innovations in internet infrastructures, which knowledge is predominantly based in the fields of engineering? I hope that preliminary answers to these questions can contribute to the discussion of tropical materialities in STS.