Chinese tech giant Alibaba last month revealed its plan to build a data centre in Vietnam to meet legal requirements for local data storage, and to meet increasing demand in one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.

The country’s biggest telecoms groups getting involved in data centres have a massive slice of the market

The group said it is to rent a location to place servers in Vietnam, with its partners in the plan to be Viettel and VNPT, to store customer data locally. At the same time, data is also stored on Alibaba’s own servers in markets such as Taiwan and Singapore.

Data centre developments have been taking place at pace in recent times. Telecoms group Viettel in April opened its 14th data centre at the Hoa Lac High-Tech Park in Hanoi. It is designed with 60,000 servers over 21,000sq.m of floor area, and total power consumption of up to 30MW.

Meanwhile, FPT is building its fourth data centre in the Saigon High-Tech Park. Currently, FPT operates three data centres with a total floor area of ​​17,000sq.m.

Data centres play an important role in storing, processing, and managing huge amounts of data for the digital world. The industry in Vietnam is increasingly demonstrating strong growth in revenues, creating jobs for local workers. Currently, customers are using data centre services mostly in gaming, e-commerce, banking, and securities.

According to a report on the global data centre industry released in February by Research and Markets, the market in Vietnam is expected to reach over $1 billion in 2028 and almost $1.3 billion in 2030. Vietnam is currently one of the top 10 emerging data centres markets worldwide.

However, the size of Vietnam’s data centre market is still small compared to neighbours such as Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Asia-Pacific is a region with a much higher data centre development rate than others, with a value of about $30 billion and a growth rate of 19 per cent annually until 2028.

According to the Ministry of Information and Communications, Vietnam currently boasts 32 small- and medium-sized commercial data centres, with a total capacity of 145MW.

Currently, most companies participating in Vietnam are domestic telecoms companies such as NTT, VNTT, Viettel, VNPT, FPT Telecom, and CMC Telecom. The latter four companies currently account for approximately 97 per cent of the market.

IT infrastructure providers are mainly international, including HP, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Lenovo, and Oracle.