Prospects bright for data centre and cloud infrastructure development

In terms of servers, Viettel holds the largest market share with 60 per cent of the country’s total, followed by FPT Telecom with 19 per cent, and VNPT 11 per cent.

Nguyen Thanh Phuc - Director-general Authority of Telecommunications Ministry of Information and Communications

Globally, each country has an average of 37 data centres. In comparison with a top 15 nation like Poland, which has 126 data centres, Vietnam lags behind.

With scale and quality, the country’s system of data centres and cloud computing can meet the demands about data infrastructure, and serve the country’s socioeconomic development, thus creating a driving force for breakthrough growth momentum in the upcoming years.

By 2025, we plan to increase the number of businesses operating data centres/cloud computing to 14, the number of data centres will increase to 55, and the numbers of services and physical cores will be doubled to more than one million, and 110 million, respectively.

The growth rate of revenue in the 2020-2022 period saw impressive results. Specifically, revenue from data centres grew 18 per cent, while the threshold of cloud computing hiked 26 per cent. In the 2023-2025 span, it is projected that the revenue growth will be 30 per cent on average and higher for both data centres and cloud computing.

In the upcoming time, to promote the development of data centre/cloud computing infrastructure, the Ministry of Information and Communications has built planning for development of data centre/cloud computing infrastructure with the perspective of the data centre system planning in line with energy planning, taking advantages of regional strengths, telecommunications connection infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and human resources.

We plan to develop at least two national data centres with a scale of 70,000 square metres, meeting Uptime Tier-3 standards or higher. We also plan to develop three national multi-target data centre clusters meeting the same standards

Multi-target data centre clusters at regional level are also planned for key economic areas. We aim to develop connection infrastructure of data centres/cloud computing at national and regional level, thus increasing the quality and better serving demands for applications with low latency.

Nowadays, one of the development requirements for data centres is to go green. It is forecast that in the next 10 years, energy consumption of data centres/cloud computing will make up half of total demand. Therefore, we need to set out relatively high standards of energy consumption. Accordingly, we set the power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio at 1.4/PUE. This is the coefficient asymptotic to countries around the world.

For some developed countries like the Netherlands, it aims to have a PUE of less than 1.2 by 2030. China strives to have a PUE ratio less than 1.3 by 2025. Recently, Singapore has issued conditions for development of data centres that is to meet PUE less than 1.3.

With the current developments and plans by businesses to develop data centres/cloud computing, as well as the ministry’s development planning, this work is an important part of Vietnam’s digital infrastructure to help meet the needs of the country’s digital economy development, and helping the country achieve the targets of becoming an upper middle-income country by 2030, and high-income country by 2045.

Ho Chi Minh City among top markets for data centre development With many of the largest markets in the APAC region boasting particularly high land costs, only Ho Chi Minh City ranks within the top 10 for the land price category for data centres.

Data centre appeal poised to expand Vietnam’s data centre sector is poised for substantial growth, although challenges surrounding regulations, construction, and mounting demand for energy efficiency need to be effectively navigated.

Indonesia plans to build various national data centres The Ministry of Communication and Informatics of Indonesia is aiming to complete and inaugurate a national data centre in Bekasi district, West Java province, by October 2024.