(VOVWORLD) - Vietnam’s data center market is assuming a greater role in the national economy with strong revenue growth and job creation. It is expected to grow to over 1 billion USD by 2028 and over 1.2 billion USD by 2030 at a compound growth rate of 10.8% each year, according to Research and Markets, the world's largest market research store.
 The Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) opens its IDC at Hoa Lac Hi-tech Park in 2023. (Photo: VNA)
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In its report on the Asia-Pacific market, real estate consultancy firm Savills Vietnam called Vietnam one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the world.
Savills said that, as of the end of the first quarter last year, Vietnam had 33 data centers operated by 48 service providers, located mainly in Hanoi and HCM city. Their customers are mostly in the areas of gaming, e-commerce, banking, and securities.
Hoang Viet Tien, Vice Secretary General of the Vietnam Digital Communications Association, affirmed that Vietnam’s data center market is receiving a lot of attention from foreign corporations like Alibaba, the Edge Centers Company of Australia, GAW Capital Partners, the NTT Group, NVIDIA, and Google, especially from last July when Vietnam opened its data center market to foreign investors.
Four domestic enterprises – Viettel, VNPT, FPT Telecom, and CMC Telecom – hold 97% of the market share. Viettel is the largest with 14 data centers, followed by VNPT and FPT.
With the boom in digital transformation, all the businesses said they’ll continue to build new data centers with a much bigger scale.
According to Nguyen Thanh Phuc, Director of the Authority of Telecommunications, digital infrastructure includes universal broadband telecoms infrastructure, cloud computing center infrastructure, and platform infrastructure.
“Data center and cloud computing are an important component to which Vietnam is attaching special importance,” said Phuc, adding, “We’ve included it in the planning for information and communications infrastructure development in which each region has a large-scale data center cluster to ensure data infrastructure for the development of the digital economy, digital society, and digital government.”
Several years ago, many big foreign tech companies intended to build their own data centers in Vietnam to tap the "primitive gold mine". But now they have started considering collaborating with domestic suppliers.
“There will likely be a big wave of investors in data centers and data center operations in Vietnam,” said Tien. “With the current support policies, foreign corporations prefer collaborating with domestic companies that already have infrastructure and licenses. We know that data centers, especially AI data centers, are going to develop strongly.”
Military-run telecom provider Viettel and Microsoft Vietnam, for example, have signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly deploy cloud computing technology.
Under the agreement, they’ve integrated the Viettel Cloud infrastructure with the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform – one of the world's top four cloud ecosystems – to improve products, localize Microsoft applications, and distribute them within Vietnam.
Meanwhile, Singapore-headquartered ST Telemedia Global Data Centers and Vietnam's VNG Corporation have announced a strategic collaboration to develop and manage international standard data centers in Ho Chi Minh City.
 Vietnam’s data center market in the Asia-Pacific region. (Photo: vietdata.vn)
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Data centers are considered the "heart" of the Internet and the "backbone" of the digital economy. They play an important role in storing, processing, and managing huge amounts of data for the digital world.
“VNPT will continue to seek cooperation opportunities with partners and investors to build new hyper-scale regional- and global-level data centers, using green, sustainable technology toward the goal of making Vietnam a regional digital hub,” said Huynh Quang Liem, CEO of Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT).
Hoang Viet Tien, Vice Secretary General of the Vietnam Digital Communications Association, said that to fully tap the contributions of data centers to the national economy, “Vietnam's focus on developing this area amid the global technology shift could make Vietnam one of the leading data centers in Southeast Asia. The key is combining the State's strategic vision, the resources of businesses, and the innovation of researchers and startups.”
Cushman & Wakefield, an American commercial real estate services firm, views Vietnam as an emerging data center market in Asia-Pacific that’s attractive to investors despite the fact that its scale is still much smaller than Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand.