Ports are usually the least exciting part of global trade. You stack boxes, you move boxes, you argue about boxes, and eventually a very large ship takes the boxes somewhere else.<\/p>\n
Singapore looked at that setup and apparently decided the whole thing needed a redesign. On its western coast, it has been sinking hollow concrete blocks the size of apartment buildings into the sea to hold up what is planned to be the largest fully automated port on the planet.<\/p>\n
The blocks are called caissons, and they’re the load-bearing wall of Phase 2 of the Tuas Port project. Each one stands as tall as a 10-story building. String 227 of them together underwater and you get a seawall that would take you the better part of two hours to walk end to end.<\/p>\n
Then you dump reclaimed land behind it, build 66 berths on top, plug in a fleet of driverless electric vehicles, and by the 2040s you have a terminal designed to handle 65 million TEUs a year. That’s roughly 20 million more than the all-time record Singapore just set.<\/p>\n
It’s a staggering amount of concrete for a country that measures about 285 square miles total. But that’s kind of the point.<\/p>\n
The engineering headline is the seawall itself. According to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore<\/a>, Phase 2 uses 227 of these 10-story caissons to form 9.1 km (about 5.7 miles) of seawall, built specifically so Singapore can push its coastline further out into the sea.<\/p>\n Phase 1 already did the same trick with 221 caissons across 8.6 km, each weighing 15,000 tons per MPA, and the Phase 2 boxes are the same 10-story scale. That’s the weight of roughly 8,000 cars per block, and 448 of these giants between the two phases.<\/p>\n The process is exactly as absurd as it sounds. Each caisson is a hollow watertight box cast on land at the site. Crews tow it out, sink it onto a prepared foundation on the seabed, ballast it with sand so it stays put, and cap it with a concrete deck. Then they do it again. And again.<\/p>\n MPA started Phase 2 reclamation in March 2018 and finished fabricating all 227 caissons in April 2022, which gives you a sense of how long a megaproject like this takes to physically produce, never mind install.<\/p>\n The reason for all that concrete is land. Singapore can’t spread out, so it builds outward. MPA calls Phase 2 the largest reclamation stage of the project at 387 hectares (about 956 acres). The caisson wall breaks the sea off, and everything behind it gets filled in until it becomes new dry ground.<\/p>\n Here’s where the story stops being a civil engineering piece and starts looking more like a data center that happens to touch water. Tuas isn’t being retrofitted for automation. It’s being designed as an automated port from the seabed up.<\/p>\n The first two berths opened in December 2021, the port officially opened on September 1, 2022, and Phase 1 alone is set to run 21 deep-water berths handling 20 million TEUs a year when fully operational in 2027, per MPA. Planning for Phase 3 has already started.<\/p>\n When Nikkei Asia toured the terminal<\/a> in early 2025, reporter Fumika Sato found a working port with barely a human in sight on a weekday. The only traffic was yellow driverless carriers shuttling containers at up to 25 km\/h (15.5 mph), tracked through RFID links to transponders buried in the pavement.<\/p>\n PSA International, the operator, says those AGVs run six to eight hours on a 20-minute charge, at automated charging stations, which is how the place operates around the clock. The fleet already tops 200 vehicles, with plans to roughly double it as the buildout continues.<\/p>\n The humans work in a control center, watching wall-sized screens and remotely supervising cranes and vehicles. It’s one of the few jobs at Tuas still done by people. A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing is working with PSA on fleet management software meant to keep hundreds of these vehicles moving efficiently as the port scales toward its 65-million target.<\/p>\n The rest of the stack, per Singapore’s Ministry of Transport<\/a>: electrified automated yard cranes, a private 5G network for the AGVs and cranes, and a smart grid feeding power where it’s needed. The ministry says the electric AGVs cut carbon emissions by about 50% versus conventional diesel prime movers.<\/p>\n If you’re picturing a slightly cursed sci-fi scene where the cargo moves itself, you’re not far off. That’s the design brief. It’s also roughly where the electric feeder ships China is already running<\/a> want to plug in.<\/p>\nA port designed to run itself<\/h2>\n
Why 65 million containers is the number that matters<\/h2>\n