Singapore’s skyline hides a quieter contest than the one playing out in its financial district. Banks, developers and regulators are working through a harder question: how does a nation with limited land and a tight power grid keep building the digital infrastructure that artificial intelligence demands without breaking its climate commitments? A fresh financing package for DayOne’s first Singapore facility offers one answer, and it comes wrapped in solid oxide fuel cells, building-integrated solar panels and a lending structure that ties capital directly to environmental performance. The deal signals that data center projects in this market are no longer judged on speed and square footage alone.
A $414.7 Million Bet on Green Infrastructure
DayOne has locked in a four-year green loan worth SGD530 million, or roughly $414.7 million, arranged jointly by DBS, OCBC and UOB. The capital will fund a 20-megawatt data center designed to serve the compute heavy workloads of artificial intelligence, cloud platforms and 5G networks. Lenders structured the facility under the internationally recognized Green Loan Principles, a framework that ties borrowing costs and covenants to verifiable sustainability outcomes rather than voluntary pledges. That distinction matters because green labeled debt in Asia has faced growing scrutiny from investors who want proof that the label reflects real engineering choices. DayOne’s project gives its lenders a concrete asset to point to, backed by measurable design features rather than marketing copy. In a market crowded with capacity announcements, the structure of the loan itself has become the headline.
What separates this facility from the dozens of other data centers rising across Singapore is its power architecture. The site is set to become the country’s first data center running on-site solid oxide fuel cell generation, built as a proof of concept for hydrogen-based energy at scale. That single design choice pulls the project out of a narrow real estate and banking conversation and places it inside a much larger debate about alternative fuels for mission critical infrastructure. Fuel cells offer steady, onsite power generation, while DayOne is testing hydrogen based energy as a lower emissions alternative for mission critical infrastructure. DayOne is effectively testing whether hydrogen based power generation can support always-on digital infrastructure through a first of its kind proof of concept in Singapore. If the technology performs as intended, the implications extend well beyond one 20 megawatt site in western Singapore.
Timeline, Location and the Mechanics of Getting Built
The facility sits in western Singapore, where developers broke ground in July 2025 on a building expected to begin commercial operations by the first quarter of 2027. That roughly eighteen-month runway matters enormously to the banks underwriting the project, because data center construction carries long lead times, heavy upfront capital costs and tight coordination requirements across power systems, cooling infrastructure and regulatory sign-off. Every stage, from securing grid connections to certifying fuel cell safety systems, has to clear before the asset can enter commercial operation. Lenders price execution risk into the loan structure, while the green loan framework provides a formal structure for financing the project’s eligible green infrastructure and sustainability features. The green loan structure provides lenders with a formal framework for assessing the project’s eligible green infrastructure and sustainability performance, rather than relying solely on reputational commitments.
DBS, OCBC and UOB are serving as joint mandated lead arrangers, bookrunners and green loan coordinators on the transaction, with DBS also acting as facility and security agent. Their combined participation reflects the growing role of green financing in funding digital infrastructure projects across Asia. What began as a niche product for wind farms and solar parks has become a mainstream tool for financing critical infrastructure of every kind, including the power-hungry facilities that run the region’s cloud and AI workloads. Three of Singapore’s largest banks backing a single data center sends a clear signal to the broader market about where credit committees now see growth. Their involvement also spreads execution risk across three balance sheets rather than concentrating it in one, which is standard practice for a financing package of this size. For developers watching from the sidelines, the syndicate structure itself is a data point worth studying.
Han Kwee Juan on the Logic Behind the Deal
Han Kwee Juan, group head of institutional banking at DBS, said demand for digital infrastructure is accelerating as AI and cloud computing reshape economies across Asia. He added that this trend is lifting energy use and increasing the need for more efficient infrastructure. His remarks positioned the deal as an extension of DBS’s experience financing digital and renewable infrastructure projects across the region. That framing is deliberate, because it positions the bank not as a newcomer chasing a hot sector but as a lender applying an established playbook to a fast-growing asset class. The bank’s participation places institutional capital behind a first-of-its-kind on-site fuel-cell proof of concept for a Singapore data center. Han’s comments frame rising AI and cloud demand as a driver of higher energy consumption and a corresponding need for more energy-efficient digital infrastructure.
Singapore’s data center market has spent the past several years living under a moratorium-driven scarcity mindset, and DayOne’s design responds directly to that pressure. The facility will feature vertical building-integrated photovoltaics, embedding solar generation into the structure itself rather than treating renewable power as an external offset. It will also run hybrid air and liquid cooling systems, a combination engineers increasingly favor because cooling alone can account for a large share of a data center’s total electricity draw. Reducing that load has a direct effect on both operating costs and the facility’s carbon intensity over its lifetime. These are not cosmetic additions layered onto a conventional design; they shape how the building was engineered from the ground up. For lenders evaluating long-term viability, that distinction between built-in and bolted-on sustainability carries real weight.
Singapore’s Highest Green Mark Certification
In December 2025, the project earned BCA Green Mark Platinum provisional certification, the top rating available under Singapore’s Green Mark for Data Centers Scheme. That certification gives DayOne and its lending banks a formal, government-recognized sustainability benchmark for the facility. Provisional certification is not the finish line, but it establishes a documented standard the finished facility must meet to retain its status. For the green loan, that certification provides an external, government-recognized sustainability benchmark alongside the project’s other documented design features. The certification provides an external benchmark for the project’s sustainability credentials before the facility enters commercial operation. DayOne now has that verification in hand before its first server has even powered on.
Founded in 2022, DayOne has expanded across Asia and Europe in a remarkably short window, building a presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong SAR, Finland and Spain. That footprint signals an ambition to operate as a cross-border digital infrastructure platform rather than a single-market developer chasing one hot jurisdiction. Few data center operators reach eight markets across two continents within four years of founding, and the pace itself tells lenders something about the company’s capital access and execution discipline. Each new market also brings its own regulatory regime, power market structure and sustainability standard, which forces a platform operator to build institutional knowledge that a single-country player never needs. That knowledge base likely made DayOne a more comfortable underwriting subject for three major Singapore banks than a first-time developer would have been. Scale, in this sense, becomes its own form of credit enhancement.
Regional Demand Meets Regulatory Pressure
Data center demand across Asia has become fundamentally regional rather than local, and that shift shapes how projects like this one get financed. Enterprises want latency-sensitive infrastructure positioned close to their customers, cloud providers need resilient capacity spread across multiple jurisdictions, and governments keep pushing for localized digital assets even as they tighten standards around power consumption and sustainability disclosure. A Singapore-based project backed by three domestic banks therefore functions on two levels at once. It delivers a financing milestone for DayOne today, and it also signals the kind of project other governments and lenders in the region will expect from future developments. Meanwhile, the combination of green financing, fuel-cell technology and certified sustainability credentials gives regulators and lenders elsewhere a potential model for financing energy-efficient digital infrastructure. Singapore, characteristically, is exporting a standard rather than just building a building.
This financing also exposes a tension running through Asia’s entire infrastructure cycle right now. Digital transformation keeps accelerating, but the energy intensity behind that transformation has become impossible to ignore at the grid level. AI workloads, large-scale cloud migration and 5G rollouts are all driving demand for bigger, more reliable facilities, and that demand raises hard questions about grid capacity, carbon intensity and the role alternative fuels like hydrogen will realistically play. Singapore faces this tension more acutely than most markets because of its limited land, constrained power supply and strict environmental standards, which make every new data center a politically sensitive investment rather than a routine real estate transaction. By linking green financing to a project built around fuel cell technology and efficiency measures. It is starting to underwrite the decarbonization of the very energy-hungry assets that AI’s growth depends on.
A Template for the Next Wave of Financing
Infrastructure sitting at the intersection of technology and sustainability offers banks a rare combination: strong underlying demand growth paired with a credible path to measurable environmental performance. If DayOne’s Singapore facility performs as designed once it comes online in 2027, it could become a reference point for future financings across the region, particularly for developers trying to combine scale, reliability and lower emissions inside one package. That said, replicating this model elsewhere will depend on bank partners, developers with the relevant capabilities and regulatory environments that support credible sustainability commitments. As data infrastructure becomes more central to the global economy, financing decisions like this one will draw closer attention from lenders, regulators and investors alike. DayOne’s Singapore project, in the end, reads less like a single data center build and more like an early marker of how the next generation of digital infrastructure gets funded, designed and judged.
