Overview
Asia is home to some of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies, and with this growth comes a surge in data infrastructure. Hyperscale data centres are rapidly emerging across markets like Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Indonesia to meet the region’s rising demand for cloud services and AI-driven applications. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres globally accounted for approximately 1–1.5% of global electricity use in 2022, with projections set to rise significantly due to generative AI and digital expansion.
At the same time, the environmental cost of digital growth is becoming increasingly significant. Data centres are highly energy- and water-intensive, contributing to rising carbon emissions, land use pressures, and grid instability—especially in regions where renewable energy capacity and infrastructure resilience are still developing. In tropical countries, such as many across Asia, these challenges are further amplified. Data centres in these climates consume substantial energy to operate cooling systems that maintain optimal temperatures for equipment. For instance, in Singapore, data centres accounted for approximately 7% of the country’s total electricity consumption in 2020.
This session will explore how governments, industry leaders, and innovators are addressing these sustainability challenges while enabling digital transformation and next-generation AI capabilities across Asia.
The fireside chat will be structured around three short, focused segments to ensure a dynamic and engaging conversation. Each segment will blend insights from practice and policy, supported by illustrative examples from the region and UNDP’s global experience.
Segment 1: Asia’s Digital Growth Footprint
Segment 2: Practical Technology and Operational Levers for Greener Data
Segment 3: Policy and Finance Pathways
Schedule
Date: 28 May 2025, Wednesday
Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM (GMT +8:00) Kuala Lumpur, Singapore
Location: 32 Carpenter Street, 059911
Speakers
Speaker's Profile:
Robert Opp, Chief Digital Officer, UNDP
Robert Opp is the Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations' global sustainable development organization working across 170 countries. UNDP adopted its second Digital Strategy in 2022, which sets out a vision to create a world in which digital is an empowering force for people and planet. Robert leads the agency’s digital transformation, an organisation-wide effort, to accelerate achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure no one is left behind. Under his leadership, UNDP’s Chief Digital Office supports more than 120 countries in building open, inclusive and rights-based digital transformations. It also brings expertise, insights and lessons from the country-level to inform global digital policy, to ensure that technologies, including digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence accelerate sustainable development. Robert also leads UNDP’s own internal digital transformation effort.
Speaker's Profile:
Lee Poh Seng, Executive Director, Energy Studies Institute (ESI)
Professor Poh Seng Lee is the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he oversees initiatives in sustainable energy, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. His work focuses on practical collaborations with industry partners such as Meta, Schneider Electric, and Equinix, supported by over S$25 million in research funding. He leads the Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed (STDCT), which explores AI-driven cooling solutions for data centers in tropical climates. His research on energy efficiency and thermal management has been published in top journals like Applied Energy and International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, and he shares insights on sustainable cooling technology at international conferences. With expertise in sustainable cooling, and industry-academia partnerships, Professor Lee emphasizes translating research into scalable solutions for energy and digital infrastructure challenges.
Speaker's Profile:
Rita Abdellatifi, ESG Data & AI Solutions Lead, Microsoft
Rita is responsible for driving Microsoft Sustainability Solutions in Asia harnessing the power of Data & AI. With over 22 years of work experience in data and advanced analytics she helped customers across the world to design their unique Digital platform to serve business purposes. With her data science background, she looks at leveraging Microsoft GenAI & innovation technology to address sustainability challenges and anticipate on proactive actions to be taken. Rita joined the IT industry in 2011 after spending several years in a bank & public services building AI solutions for business applications. She also used to teach mathematics & statistics at University La Sorbonne in Paris. She is originally from France and travelled around the globe (Europe, Middle East, China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia...) to showcase the value of data and artificial intelligence. She moved to Singapore 10 years ago where she has been constantly embracing sustainable innovation across Asia.
