STT GDC expands into Vietnam with hyperscale data centre

STT GDC is expanding into Vietnam as part of a joint venture partnership with VNG Corporation.

This announcement came last week, though I've not had the opportunity to write about it then.

The partnership

The partnership is for the development, construction, and operation of data centre projects in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

• VNG Data Center renamed STT VNG Ho Chi Minh City 1.
• New STT VNG Ho Chi Minh City 2 built by 2026.
• Data centres situated 1.5km apart.

What caught my attention was how the existing VNG Data Centre has a Tier 3 Certificate of Constructed Facility, which many eschew.

In fact, Uptime's website lists just 3 such data centres in Vietnam right now.

Twin data center strategy

From the press release, it is clear that the strategy is to leverage an existing data centre with connectivity with a new greenfield data centre with greater capacity.

🔸STT VNG Ho Chi Minh City 1 is 9.6MW and "strategically positioned" to provide network coverage to major local telecom operators, cloud providers, and enterprises.

🔸STT VNG Ho Chi Minh City 2 will offer up to 60MW of IT workloads.

And while it wasn't mentioned, I would be extremely surprised if there aren't plans to pull dark fibre between the two data centres.

After all, STT GDC did announce plans to hook up its Johor data centre with cross-border dark fibre to STT Singapore 5 at Tai Seng in Singapore. So what is a mere 1.5km?

(Read about STT Johor here: https://lnkd.in/gi3usKdy)

Rapid growth in ASEAN

According to the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE), ASEAN is set to experience the largest growth ever over the next 5 years, going from 1.5GW to 3.2GW.

The lion's share is in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, countries such as Vietnam is also expected to see sharp growth.

It does look like STT GDC is set to be one of the earlier players to build a modern hyperscale facility in Vietnam.