With every refresh of our Market Connectivity Score, we find new stories to tell about the state of interconnectivity.
For example, our Q2 2025 refresh saw Kuala Lumpur dethroned from the top spot among the fastest-growing cities, replaced by Hong Kong and Manila. (It had held the top spot for over a year.) Check out the video below for a closer look at these markets.
The Market Connectivity Score ranks the most connected and fastest growing cities by tracking 45 different data points for 3,000 cities worldwide. Part of that score considers how regulations and governance impact interconnectivity.
To better understand this regulatory story, we invited the team at Assembly Research (experts in regulatory, policy, and legislative developments that affect communications markets and the digital economy) to look at how regulations and governance impact connectivity and why we're seeing certain cities at the top of our rankings again and again.
We'll let Assembly Research take it from here.
As governments around the world seek to distinguish themselves as welcoming sites for investment in data center infrastructure, regulators have been increasingly tasked with ensuring new data developments adhere to existing standards for, and obligations of, digital infrastructure within their jurisdiction.
However, unlike some other forms of network infrastructure (such as fixed and mobile connectivity), data centers have also posed new challenges for regulators, given their unique economic and environmental footprints.
We reviewed some of the key changes in environmental regulation impacting data centers in the markets leading TeleGeography’s Market Connectivity Score ranking. Here is what we've found.
Singapore: Long-Time Leader Continuing to Innovate
As one of the earliest regulations to address the sustainability of data infrastructure, the Green Data Centre Standard developed by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in Singapore is an antecedent and inspiration to many of the reforms that have followed in more recent years.
Since the co-regulatory development of this set of standards more than a decade ago, the IMDA has updated its work with more specific targets for improved energy efficiency and an updated rating system for sustainable data centers. Through the refreshed Green Mark for Data Centers, developed in collaboration with the Building and Construction Authority, operators can achieve sustainability rankings based primarily on energy efficiency, as well as on water use and sustainable construction practices.
As part of its roadmap for green data centers, the IMDA has also targeted a power usage effectiveness (PUE) value of under 1.3 for all data centers in the next 10 years (where a value of 1 represents perfect efficiency). Embracing its world-leader status and acknowledging its challenging climate, the IMDA also published a new standard for tropical data centers aimed at supporting operators in safely raising the standard operating temperatures of their facilities to lower energy consumption for cooling.
Tokyo: Ambitions to Achieve Carbon Neutrality Within a Strong Investment Environment
Through the latest revisions to the Energy Conservation Act in 2022, the Japanese Government introduced reporting standards for data centers’ energy efficiency and set benchmarks for improving those levels moving forward. Operators are required to report annually on their PUE and are expected to work towards a target PUE value of 1.4.
This goal is paired with further ambitions communicated in the Japanese Government's Green Growth Strategy, published in 2020, to see data centers achieve a 30% reduction in energy usage by 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality by 2040. Taken together with the much higher level of resilience in Japan’s commercial energy grid when compared to countries such as the US and the UK, the Government is making an active push to turn its highly reliable environment into an increasingly sustainable ecosystem for data infrastructure.
EU (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris): Using Transparency to Develop Standards and Drive Efficiency
Similar to the reporting requirements in Japan, the European Commission (EC) has also adopted data reporting requirements for data centers as of 2024. Through the new Energy Efficiency Directive, the EC established public reporting requirements for data centers with an installed information technology power demand of at least 500kW.
Data center operators must report on:
- The total energy consumption of their facility
- The specific consumption of IT equipment
- Water consumption
- Consumption of green energy sources
- The reuse of waste heat.
That information is published in a European database (with additional information on facilities in each Member State). It will be used to create a common rating system for data center sustainability. The EC states that it intends to drive further competition among data center operators to develop new and more efficient methods within their facilities.
Considering that the environmental impacts of data centers are often felt most acutely at the local level, it’s unsurprising that a number of local authorities have also taken action to regulate the construction of new centers and the operation of existing facilities.
Planning authorities in Northern Virginia – outside the hub of Washington, DC – as well as in Dublin, have halted data center development and tightened the review standards for new facilities, due in part to concerns about the potential strain on energy infrastructure. As national governments work to implement transparency and reporting requirements, regulation at the local and state levels may prove a more eventful locus of action in the near term.
