Sembcorp gets green light to invest in 90MW Vietnam data centre
The energy giant supplies a third of Singapore's data centre power goes to Vietnam.
Singapore's Sembcorp just got the green light to invest in a 90MW data centre in Ho Chi Minh City, its first step from powering data centres to owning them.
Vietnam data centre
The data centre campus will be built through a 49%-owned joint venture with BB Holdings, known as StarMason Joint Stock Company. With the approval, StarMason plans to progress evaluation and detailed development planning for a data centre campus of up to 90MW.
The stated goal is to meet rising demand for cloud and AI. The facility will be located in Saigon Hi-Tech Park on 4.5 hectares of land, designed to Tier 3 standards, and built in phases.
According to its press release, Sembcorp is looking to Uptime Institute standards and hopes to achieve Tier IV classification for its hyperscale facility, a notable ambition for a first data centre venture.
Sembcorp: global energy firm
Sembcorp is a global energy company with operations in 11 countries and some 25GW of total capacity, of which 17.2GW comes from renewable sources. It supplies over 690MW of power to high-tech manufacturing in Singapore, including a recent 150MW deal with Micron, a leader in memory solutions.
While Sembcorp doesn't operate any data centres today, it supplies roughly a third of all data centre energy demand in Singapore, making it the dominant green energy provider for the sector here. That positioning gives it a unique vantage point. Few companies understand the energy requirements of data centres as intimately as the firm that powers so many of them.
The wind is shifting
The move into Vietnam is not an isolated play. Apart from the StarMason joint venture, Sembcorp signed an MOU with NeutraDC in Indonesia last August to build sustainable data centres across Southeast Asia. The pattern suggests a deliberate pivot from energy supplier to infrastructure owner.
For a company with 17.2GW of renewable capacity and deep relationships with data centre operators across Singapore, the transition from powering data centres to owning them is a logical one. The question now is where Sembcorp will develop its next facility.
