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Vietnam Leases 4.5 Hectares to Sembcorp Joint Venture for $480M Hyperscale Data Center in Ho Chi Minh City

By: IDCNOVARegion: Southeast Asia
Ho Chi Minh City has approved a land lease of 4.5 hectares in its Saigon Hi-Tech Park to Starmason, a joint venture between Singapore's Sembcorp Development and Vietnamese partner BB Holding, paving the way for a $480 million hyperscale data center that underscores Vietnam's emergence as a fast-growing digital infrastructure market in Southeast Asia.

The HCMC People's Committee said in a statement on Wednesday that the lease was approved for a term running to 2076. The Starmason complex carries registered investment of $480 million, according to its investment approval granted in March. The facility is designed for an initial 60 MW of IT capacity and is expandable to 90 MW, positioning it among the larger data center projects planned in the country. It will serve workloads including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big-data processing, and high-performance computing.

The project is designed to meet the Uptime Institute's Tier III standard for data centers, with the aim of ultimately achieving the top Tier IV rating — a certification that denotes fault tolerance and minimal downtime risk, which is increasingly sought after by hyperscale and enterprise tenants in the region.

Starmason was incorporated in November 2025 to develop the project. Sembcorp Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore's Sembcorp Industries, later acquired 49 percent of the venture alongside BB Holding. Lee Ark Boon, chief executive of Sembcorp Development, said in March that Vietnam's digital economy was accelerating on the back of cloud adoption and AI. Sembcorp said Starmason would look to expand its data-center development pipeline in Vietnam, signaling the joint venture's ambitions beyond a single campus.

The lease adds to a rush of data-center investment in Ho Chi Minh City. The Saigon Hi-Tech Park drew more than $1.2 billion across four high-tech projects in early 2026, including two hyperscale data centers, reflecting the city's push to attract digital infrastructure spending. Vietnam has become an increasingly attractive destination for data center operators as demand for cloud and AI services grows across Southeast Asia, driven by a young, digitally engaged population and expanding enterprise digitization.