Slathered in a five-millimetre-thick onyx facade backlit with LED lights, The Reserve resembles a massive brick of gold lying just outside Singapore’s Changi Airport. The effect is somewhat misleading, because that glowing golden slab is one of the world’s largest storage facilities for silver, refurbished from its drab past as an electronics factory.
There’s still gold inside — The Reserve claims space for roughly 100 tonnes of gold and platinum — but that’s tiny compared to the 15,500 tonnes of silver stashed behind its gleaming walls.
To put that in perspective, all the world’s silver mines produced roughly 25,000 tonnes in 2024, meaning this one facility can store nearly two-thirds of global production. Inside, there’s an overlook, appropriately named the Silver Cliff, where patrons can gaze over a single vault stacked with more than 10,000 tonnes of silver.
In an era of rising global conflict, The Reserve bills itself as a “safe haven for intergenerational wealth,” boasting a 2.5-tonne door, quadruple alarm systems, mantraps, motion and vibration sensors, nearly 500 CCTV cameras and operational security provided by armed Singapore Auxiliary Police.
Gold and platinum are stored in a special UL-rated Class II vault (literally a vault within a vault) with composite steel walls 30 centimetres thick. And sorry, hackers, but the vault’s management system is hosted offline, meaning it’s physically disconnected from the internet.
Beyond bullion, The Reserve has 12,500 safe deposit boxes, or enough for every one of the world’s 3,028 billionaires (according to the 2025 Forbes ranking) to each have four.
They won’t even have to store their fancy watches there, as level four of The Reserve is home to The Xcess, which specializes in the preservation, restoration and authentication of luxury timepieces and employs Swiss-trained watchmakers. Owners can use their watches as collateral to get loans, and eventually, the aptly named Xcess is planning to digitize timepieces so they can be linked to NFTs (because of course there had to be a crypto component).
On the top level is a coffee bar operated by Singapore-based speciality coffee company Sojourner. One can only imagine what a latte there must cost.
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