How Asia Is Building 10- and 11-Story Data Centers in Land-Constrained Cities
How Asia Is Building 10- and 11-Story Data Centers in Land-Constrained Cities
In land-constrained Asian cities, developers are taking the traditional horizontal data-center campus and turning it vertical. Heavy-duty foundations, unusually strong floors, tall data halls, massive freight systems, vertical power and cooling shafts, and new cooling technologies allow server infrastructure to be stacked across 10 or 11 floors without sacrificing reliability.
A conventional hyperscale data center is easy to recognize: a huge, relatively low building surrounded by electrical equipment, generators, cooling systems, and plenty of land.
That model works well in places such as rural Texas or northern Virginia. It becomes considerably less attractive when the land happens to be in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or central Jakarta and costs a small fortune.
Asian developers have therefore been solving the problem in the same way dense cities have solved housing and offices for generations: build upward.
The difference is that a data center is not an office tower filled with desks and people. Each floor may contain enormous quantities of servers, batteries, electrical equipment, cooling systems, cables, pipes, and backup infrastructure.
Making that work 10 or 11 stories above ground requires the entire building to be engineered around computing from the foundation upward.
1. Land Scarcity Is Forcing Data Centers to Go Vertical
Singapore provides one of the clearest examples.
Meta designed its Singapore data center as an 11-story building occupying roughly 12 acres while providing about 170,000 square meters of floor area.
Singapore's government has identified land scarcity as one of the fundamental constraints on data-center expansion. Even traditional facilities in the city-state have commonly been six to eight stories high.
Going to 10 or 11 floors takes the idea considerably further.
The approach allows several conventional data-center buildings worth of server capacity to be concentrated inside a single structure. An 11-story facility on Singapore's Sunview Drive, for example, was designed for up to 150 MW of power and roughly 170,000 square meters of space.
Hong Kong has followed the same logic for years. Developers have converted old industrial towers into data centers and constructed purpose-built multi-story facilities because acquiring a giant horizontal site close to the city is difficult and expensive.
2. The Building Has to Carry Extraordinary Weight
The first engineering problem is gravity.
A conventional office contains desks, chairs, partitions, and people. A data hall can contain rows of dense server racks, UPS equipment, batteries, cooling hardware, busways, pipes, and cable systems.
Meta's Singapore facility was designed with drilled concrete piles, some as wide as 1.6 meters, supporting reinforced-concrete columns, beams, and concrete floor systems.
Another emerging example is SMX01 in Jakarta. The 11-story project is designed for approximately 2.5 metric tons of floor loading per square meter.
That strength becomes increasingly important as AI hardware grows denser. Modern GPU racks can consume tens or even more than 100 kilowatts each. Liquid-cooling systems can add further weight through coolant distribution equipment or immersion tanks.
The floors are also unusually tall. SMX01 uses approximately nine meters between structural slabs in parts of the facility. That means its 11 stories can reach roughly the height associated with a much taller residential tower.
3. Power, Fiber and Cooling Have to Move Vertically
A horizontal data center can place much of its mechanical and electrical infrastructure beside the server halls.
A high-rise data center cannot.
Electrical power must travel upward through heavy-duty busways and risers. Fiber-optic networks need redundant vertical routes. Cooling water or refrigerant systems must move between floors. Fire protection, drainage, controls, and monitoring systems all require their own protected pathways.
One solution is to divide the building into semi-independent modules.
Some multi-floor Asian data centers provide individual floors with dedicated transformers, UPS systems, generators, or cooling equipment. That reduces dependence on one gigantic central system and allows sections of the building to be maintained or expanded without affecting every data hall.
Hong Kong designs have similarly placed transformer and switchgear rooms on lower levels, data halls and mechanical floors above them, and chillers or other plant equipment at roof level.
The building effectively becomes a stack of industrial computer rooms connected through enormous utility arteries.
4. Cooling Is One of the Hardest Problems in a Tall Data Center
Cooling creates a peculiar problem in vertical construction.
If an engineer adds another data floor, the building gains thousands of square feet of heat-producing servers. But the roof does not become any larger.
Eventually there may not be enough roof area for all the cooling towers, chillers, or heat-rejection equipment required by the additional computing capacity.
Designers have responded by distributing thermal infrastructure throughout the building.
Meta's Singapore facility uses a perforated lightweight façade designed to promote airflow around mechanical equipment. Other high-rise designs place cooling equipment on exterior platforms or along the sides of the structure instead of concentrating everything on the roof.
Liquid cooling changes the equation further.
Singapore's eight-story DC Tuas, opened in 2026, uses large-scale direct-to-chip liquid cooling for high-density AI workloads. Liquid can remove heat much closer to the processors than traditional room-scale air conditioning, allowing much denser computing installations.
For future vertical facilities, this could be crucial. Higher rack densities mean developers can obtain more computing capacity from every expensive square meter of land without needing proportionally larger amounts of air-handling space.
5. Construction and Maintenance Become a Logistics Puzzle
A 10-story data center creates another issue that a sprawling one-story facility rarely faces: vertical logistics.
Data-center buildings therefore need heavy-duty freight elevators, large loading areas, equipment corridors, removable wall sections, lifting points, and carefully planned routes for moving machinery.
This matters not only during construction. Servers, UPS modules, batteries, cooling equipment, and electrical components will be replaced repeatedly during the building's operating life.
Construction itself can become unusually complicated.
One 11-story Singapore project used a bottom-up approach for the main structure while parts of the internal fit-out progressed from upper areas downward. Contractors also used climbing formwork systems to construct the core walls as the tower rose.
Fire protection is another major consideration. Data halls are compartmentalized, evacuation routes must remain protected, and redundant power and cooling systems must be separated so that one failure does not disable the entire building.
The result is less like building an ordinary skyscraper and more like stacking several power-intensive industrial facilities on top of one another.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
- Land: Vertical construction dramatically increases computing space on expensive urban sites.
- Structure: Deep foundations, reinforced concrete frames, and very high floor-load ratings support racks, batteries, and mechanical equipment.
- Utilities: Power, fiber, water, and cooling move through large redundant vertical risers rather than across a sprawling campus.
- Cooling: Side-mounted systems, distributed mechanical equipment, and liquid cooling help solve the limited-roof-space problem.
- Logistics: Heavy freight elevators, loading platforms, and specialized equipment routes are required throughout the building's life.
| Engineering Problem | Vertical Data Center Solution |
|---|---|
| Limited land | Stack data halls across multiple floors |
| Heavy equipment | Deep foundations and high-load reinforced floors |
| Power distribution | Vertical electrical risers and floor-level infrastructure modules |
| Heat rejection | Distributed cooling, façade systems and liquid cooling |
| Equipment movement | High-capacity cargo lifts, loading zones and lifting routes |
The Data Center Is Starting to Look Like a Skyscraper
Vertical data centers are unlikely to replace giant horizontal campuses everywhere.
If inexpensive land and electricity are available, spreading equipment across a large campus remains simpler. Horizontal layouts usually make construction, maintenance, cooling, and equipment replacement easier.
Dense Asian cities change that calculation.
When land is scarce but demand for cloud and AI computing remains high, developers can justify spending more on structural engineering and complex mechanical systems in exchange for fitting much more computing capacity onto the same site.
The trend is also being accelerated by AI. Higher-density chips and direct liquid cooling allow significantly more computing power to fit inside each rack, while improved power distribution and modular mechanical systems make stacked halls increasingly practical.
Singapore's experience shows how far the idea can go. What once looked like an unusual solution to land scarcity has evolved into 8-, 10-, and 11-story facilities capable of supporting tens or even hundreds of megawatts.
The strange part is that these towers contain almost no residents. Instead, entire floors are occupied by machines talking to other machines while humans outside complain that apartments are too expensive. Urban planning does have a sense of humor.
Sources
Meta Engineering — Rethinking Data Center Design for Singapore.
PERI Singapore — Data Center at Sunview Drive, Singapore.
Singapore IMDA — High-Rise Green Data Centre Fact Sheet.
Singapore JTC / Singtel Nxera — DC Tuas Opening, February 2026.
SM+ / Tech Stories — SMX01 Jakarta Data Center Design.
Hong Kong Government — Hong Kong as a Prime Location for Data Centres.
Arcadis — Data Center Location Index and Hong Kong Multi-Storey Data Center Case Study.
