In September 2024, a fire broke out in a battery room on the third floor of a Digital Realty data centre in Singapore. What should have been a contained electrical incident stretched into a multi-day operation that disrupted cloud services for one of the facility's largest tenants.
What happened
The Singapore Civil Defence Force confirmed the fire involved lithium-ion batteries housed in dedicated battery rooms on the third floor of the four-storey SIN11 facility. SCDF deployed four water jets and activated the building's sprinkler system, while roughly twenty occupants were evacuated before firefighters arrived. By that evening, an unmanned firefighting robot had been brought in to cool the affected batteries, with SCDF describing it as likely to be a prolonged operation.
They were right. The incident stretched into a second day. Alibaba Cloud, which ran services from the site, reported that continued water spraying for firefighting caused water accumulation in the server room, raising the risk of electrical short circuits and forcing an emergency power shutdown across part of the facility. Industry reporting later noted the facility had been built in 2016, before Singapore's 2020 safety standards required ESS installations to sit on the ground floor rather than upper storeys.
Why this kept escalating
Lithium-ion battery fires are notoriously difficult to fully extinguish. Once thermal runaway begins inside a cell, it can generate its own heat and fuel independent of the surrounding oxygen supply, meaning a fire can reignite even after visible flames appear to be out. Conventional gaseous suppression and water-based systems are built to respond to a room-level fire signature — smoke, heat, or flame at a scale a sensor can register — not to a single overheating cell moments before it vents.
That gap between "cell starts to fail" and "detector confirms a fire" is exactly where an incident like this gets away from a facility. And the secondary damage here illustrates a second problem entirely separate from the fire itself: the water used to fight a battery fire in an enclosed electrical space creates its own short-circuit risk, which is part of why the response required a full power shutdown rather than a contained, localised response.
Where an active layer changes the outcome
- Cell-to-cell containment: AEGIS's double-sheet structure blocks heat transfer to adjacent cells, addressing thermal runaway propagation directly rather than relying on a room-scale response after the fact.
- No de-energising required: With a breakdown voltage of 48kV, AEGIS can activate on live electrical equipment — removing the delay and risk of manually de-energising a battery room before intervention.
- Zero cleanup, no water damage: FK-5-1-12 vaporises on activation, avoiding the secondary short-circuit and water-damage risk that extended this incident into a multi-day recovery.
- Blind-spot coverage: PAD-format protection at the panel and rack level covers exactly the enclosed spaces standard smoke and heat detection is slowest to reach.
The regulatory backdrop
Singapore's 2020 SCDF safety standards already require ESS installations to sit at ground level specifically because of battery fire risk — a rule this facility predated. As data centre capacity across Singapore and the wider region continues to expand alongside rising demand for AI compute, retrofit and new-build facilities alike face the same underlying question: what happens in the minutes before a room-level detector confirms what a single failing cell already knows.
Sourced from public reporting by Data Center Dynamics, W.Media and JLL Asia Pacific research on the September 2024 Digital Realty SIN11 incident, and SCDF public statements. This article is an independent analysis by Aegis Singapore and is not affiliated with Digital Realty, Alibaba Cloud or SCDF.
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