Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) is forcing a seismic rethink of Asia’s energy trajectory, with data centres at the epicentre of demand.

At the recent Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit 2025 in Singapore, Giorgio Fortunato, head of clean energy and power, Asia-Pacific at Google, and Yee May Leong, managing director, Singapore, at Equinix, offered a frontline overview of the AI-energy nexus reshaping Asia’s grid and climate goals.

Leong underscores the exponential nature of AI's energy impact: “With AI, it's kind of just pushed that whole demand from what was gradual to a hockey stick.”

She notes that Equinix, which runs over 250 data centres globally, has witnessed grids grinding to a halt in some regions as energy needs scale up from megawatts to gigawatts. Singapore, for example, paused new data centre approvals for over three years, not just to manage load but also to help the city-state hit its ambitious carbon targets.

While Southeast Asia still registers as a sliver on global data centre power demand charts, that indicator lags what is happening on the ground. “There’s going to be so much more demand with all this digital-first entrance,” Leong says, referencing Asean’s digital boom. The bottleneck is not in the demand, but in the infrastructure.

Google’s Fortunato addresses the conundrum directly: how can companies power AI growth without derailing their net-zero pledges? The answer lies in the “dual pillars” of efficiency and clean energy.

In 2023 alone, Google’s energy use rose 27%, yet emissions from its data centres fell by 12%. This paradox, Fortunato notes, stems from significant gains in energy efficiency. “Today, we can deliver six times, not six percent, but six times more computing power with the same amount of energy compared to five years ago.”

Eventually, the nuclear option

Still, clean energy procurement in Asia is a challenge. Fortunato acknowledges patchy regulatory frameworks across the region but frames these not as roadblocks but as “opportunities to bring investment into the market”.

In Taiwan, where supply is limited, Google has seeded a 1-gigawatt pipeline of solar, wind, and geothermal. In India, the tech giant designed a hybrid wind-solar power purchase agreement to tackle intermittency, while in Japan, it aggregated micro-generators to offset tight land availability.

Singapore is punching above its weight in this arena. The city-state’s insistence on green power for new data centre licences is pushing industry players to innovate, from solar imports to hydrogen pilots to potentially small modular reactors ( SMRs ).

Equinix, Leong notes, has backed a 500-megawatt SMR project in Oklahoma, and she sees potential for SMR adoption within eight to ten years in Asia.

Both speakers stress the importance of collaboration. “We are working hand in hand with governments, developers, and peers,” Fortunato says, citing Google's role in founding the Asia Clean Energy Coalition. Leong agreed, noting, “If all of us do collaborate, the green energy transition options will be made more available… meaning everybody wins.”

As data becomes one of Asia’s most valuable commodities, the ability to scale AI without escalating emissions may define not just the energy mix, but the region’s economic competitiveness.