For years, commentators in contrast information to one of many world’s most essential commodities: oil. Very similar to how huge oil reserves conferred wealth and energy on the world’s petrostates and fossil-fuel corporations within the twentieth century, international locations and firms with numerous information may leverage that useful resource within the twenty first century.
The argument is taking over better relevance with the rise of AI: Massive international locations just like the U.S. and China can prepare their AI fashions on huge quantities of information, whereas smaller economies, with much less information available, simply can’t sustain.
However Josephine Teo, Singapore’s minister for digital improvement and data, argued on the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore convention on Tuesday that oil is the incorrect comparability to make when speaking about how international locations use information.
Not like oil—a finite useful resource that goes away as soon as extracted and used—information could be “recombined” many instances over, she mentioned. “Data is actually more useful when it is reused in many different contexts.”
Singapore adopted an AI technique in 2019, and is now making an attempt to leverage its present strengths as a commerce and journey hub to bolster its improvement of the brand new expertise. “We aren’t trying to be an AI superpower. We don’t need to be,” Teo instructed Fortune in a latest characteristic on the nation’s plans for AI.
On Tuesday, Teo steered the nation’s vibrant economic system is a technique Singapore can get entry to the info it wants. “If you consider the size of our GDP, and use it as an indication of the breadth and depth of activities that are taking place in Singapore, and that every single one of those activities generates a data point—then maybe the data is not as small as we think it is,” she defined.
‘Tropical’ information facilities
Nonetheless, the Singaporean minister famous some potential challenges to the nation’s AI hopes. “In any new field, the pool of talent is always going to be a concern,” she mentioned. “It’s not broad enough, it’s not deep enough.”
However she pushed again in opposition to strategies that Singapore’s transient moratorium on information facilities had hindered the nation’s attractiveness as an AI hub.
In 2019, the Singaporean authorities briefly paused approvals of latest information facilities, owing to issues about land use and energy consumption. Operators fled elsewhere, together with to neighboring Malaysia, which is now attracting billions of {dollars} in funding from Huge Tech firms like Microsoft and Google.
However Teo argued Singapore, with 70 information facilities, has among the world’s “densest data center capacity.”
“If you look at our data center capacity relative to the size of our GDP, and if you compare it to, say, Japan or if you compare it to China, actually we have way more,” she claimed.
Whereas Singapore is open to having extra information facilities, “the question is how do we do it whilst also being able to fulfill our commitments to the net-zero pathway,” she requested.
The reply is “tropical [data center] standards,” she mentioned. “If you’re operating the data center in a tropical climate, do you need to operate it at a temperature that is so low? Or [is it that] actually with one degree higher, you’re okay?”
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