Big proposed investment, little concrete detail on plans
Emirati cloud and data center firm G42 is part of a group of investors proposing a $2bn data center development in Vietnam.
As reported by Vietnam News Agency, the proposal was submitted on July 6 to the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee.
All the other investors are Vietnamese. They include FPT, an IT and telco company; VinaCapital Investment Fund; and Viet Thai Investment Group.
Details are sparse. The facility will be located in Ho Chi Minh City, but the capacity, size, exact location, construction timeline, and the identity of the end user is unclear.
According to Vietnam Investment Review, the proposal notes that legal and regulatory challenges related to data monitoring and retrieval procedures could ward off investors, and suggests the implementation of ‘special mechanisms’ in order to alleviate the issue. Specifics were not provided.
G42, which is chaired and majority owned by the brother of the UAE’s president, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is best known for its involvement in Stargate UAE, which will be the first international deployment of the Stargate infrastructure project.
The company owns a large stake in Khazna, an Emirati wholesale data center operator. It operates 30 data centers across the UAE and is developing facilities in Egypt and Turkey (Türkiye).
Vietnam is a growing data center market. It relaxed its laws regarding foreign ownership of data centers in July 2024, removing the 49 percent foreign ownership cap.
