Military-run telco Viettel inaugurates biggest data center in Vietnam

Military-owned telecom firm Viettel has inaugurated a 30-MW data center in Hoa Lac Hi-tech Park on the outskirts of Hanoi, the largest of its kind in Vietnam.

Covering 21,000 square meters, the new center houses over 60,000 servers and more than 2,400 racks, and has a capacity double the average in Vietnam, the government's news portal said.

The center is the 14th built by Viettel, and is designed to handle the compute and capacity demands of artificial intelligence (AI) apps and services.

It brings the telco’s total capacity to 230,000 servers, 81,000 sq.m of floor space, 11,500 racks, and 87 MW of electricity, which is equivalent to a global super data center.

Holding several green certificates such as energy management, environmental impact, and labor hygiene management standards, it is also the first data center in Vietnam to commit to being 30% powered by renewable energy.

Looking ahead, the telco will invest an additional VND10 trillion ($401 million) in data centers, raising its capacity to 17,000 racks by 2025, and VND40 trillion to reach 34,000 racks by 2030, said the company’s chairman and general director, Tao Duc Thang.

With this capacity, Viettel is ready to support a boom in cloud computing services in Vietnam, Thang added.

Speaking at the inauguration, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung hailed Viettel’s plan to build at least three more data centers in the next two years with a combined capacity of 240 MW.

The minister noted that investing in data centers will open up new growth space for telecommunications service providers in the country.

He also highlighted data as the most important resource of a digital economy, and a country's future wealth is measured by data. A safe and reliable data center with maximum security and the most advanced technology like Viettel’s Hoa Lac facility will play an important role in protecting data sovereignty and personal data in Vietnam.

In October 2023, state-owned telco VNPT opened the VNPT IDC Hoa Lac data center, the biggest in Vietnam at the time, also in Hoa Lac Hi-tech Park. The facility, VNPT's eighth, covers 2.3 hectares and can support 2,000 racks.

Vietnam’s cloud and data center industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, according to Savills Vietnam.

Domestic and foreign firms have rushed to build data centers in the Southeast Asian country, which is speeding up digital transformation and implementing stricter regulations on data localization for foreign firms.

Notable players in Vietnam’s data center segment include local telcos such as Viettel IDC, NTT Global Data Centers, FTP Telecom, CMC Telecom, HTC Telecom International, VNPT, and VNTT, while foreign firms like Amazon Web Services, HP, Dell, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, NEC Corp, and Oracle are also present.