ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, Phaidra Work Together to Optimise Data Centre Cooling and Operations
The Partnership Is a Step Towards Being Carbon Neutral by 2030
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, one of the world’s fastest-growing data centre colocation services providers, has announced its collaboration with Phaidra, pioneer of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve efficiency, stability, and sustainability, to pilot an AI-based autonomous control system for optimising data centre cooling in the former’s facilities in Singapore.
Phaidra provides AI-powered control systems for data centres. Their autonomous AI agents build upon legacy control systems and support facility operations teams by analysing thousands of sensor trends in real-time to maximise energy efficiency, reliability, and cooling performance using specialised deep learning models. Because this is a closed-loop solution, these AI agents continuously learn and adapt to changing facility conditions such as load variations due to higher density GPU deployments or external weather changes.
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres’ commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030, along with its collaboration with Phaidra, aligns with Singapore’s vision of a greener future for the data centre industry. As the power needs of AI workloads continue to grow, data centre cooling and operational infrastructure must evolve to keep pace. This evolution is essential to more effectively and sustainably manage the heat generated by the high-performance computing requirements necessary to support accelerated computing workloads such as AI and beyond.
Partnership with Phaidra Makes ST Telemedia Global Data Centres a Pioneer
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres will be the first operator to pilot Phaidra’s AI-powered control systems in Asia, setting a unique precedent by testing them in a hybrid cooling environment that is technically more challenging as compared to traditional air-cooled data centres.
Selected data centres of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres offer a combination of both air-cooling and liquid-cooling solutions, supporting diverse computing workloads within the same facility. This pioneering effort underscores the company’s commitment to innovative and sustainable data centre management. Based on existing site parameters, an initial estimate of 10% in cooling energy savings is anticipated. As the AI model is fed more operational data, energy savings are expected to increase from the 10% baseline to as high as 30%. This flagship pilot will serve as a model for possible subsequent deployments across the colocation provider’s portfolio of data centres globally.
“Combining our expertise in delivering AI-ready data centres across major economic hubs with Phaidra’s industry-leading know-how in using AI to optimise mission-critical control systems, we are leading the way in using AI to further drive sustainability within our data centres. Through this collaboration, we are not only seeing meaningful impact on our ongoing decarbonisation efforts, but also significant efficiency gains in data centre operations that already offer a hybrid of both air and liquid cooling. This pilot is testament to our commitment to drive sustainable innovation across our data centres,” said Daniel Pointon, Group Chief Technology Officer, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
“Phaidra is proud to work with a leading data centre services provider like ST Telemedia Global Data Centres. Its culture of operational excellence, relentless improvement and innovation makes for a natural partnership. We look forward to driving the data centre industry forward together,” replied Jim Gao, CEO and co-founder of Phaidra.
AI is already making inroads towards transforming the global economy. Analysis from PWC indicates that AI could potentially contribute up to USD $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, along with up to 26% boost in GDP for local economies from AI by the same year. While a sufficient level of AI-readiness is required to take advantage of these economic opportunities, there also must be considerations towards doing so in a sustainable manner.
As a leading data centre hub both regionally and internationally, Singapore is uniquely positioned to drive sustainable innovation in the data centre space. Recently, Singapore announced its Green Data Centre Roadmap for sustainable growth, with plans to accelerate data centres’ energy efficiency at both hardware and software levels, as well as to increase data centres’ use of green energy to expand capacity.
