AI is reshaping the Data Center and Cloud market
In the context of AI moving from the testing phase to practical operation, the question for businesses is no longer: Is it necessary to apply AI or not, but how to effectively deploy AI on a large scale and create real value?
At the Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Summit (DCCI Summit) 2026 organized by Viettel IDC on April 20, Mr. Le Ba Tan - CEO of Viettel IDC emphasized that in the 2026–2030 period, the appropriate view is not to look at AI individually, but to look at an interconnected infrastructure chain.
According to Mr. Le Ba Tan, there are currently about 11,000 data centers in the world, but AI Data Centers, although accounting for less than 1% of the number, have consumed up to 25% of the total power of the entire system. This figure shows that AI not only increases the demand for data processing, but is also changing the structure of the global data infrastructure itself.
If traditional data centers usually operate at 20–30kW per rack, then with AI, this density can increase to 100kW, even more than 200kW per rack. This leads to a series of new requirements for power supply, cooling, network connection and continuous operation. In other words, data centers in the new stage not only need to expand in scale, but must be redesigned to suit much larger computing loads," Mr. Tan analyzed.
According to the CEO of Viettel IDC, this trend makes the operational problem change significantly. In the context of electricity and cooling costs becoming increasingly a major pressure, modern data centers are forced to move towards smarter, more efficient and energy-saving models. This is also the reason why sustainable development is no longer just an image message, but has become a requirement directly linked to investment efficiency and the competitiveness of AI infrastructure.
Not only on a global scale, these changes are also opening up a new growth cycle for the data center market in the region. According to data presented at the event, the global data center market is forecast to reach 627.4 billion USD by 2030, while the APAC region reaches 174.8 billion USD. Vietnam, although smaller in absolute scale, is in the group of markets with high growth rates, about 14.2%, almost equivalent to the growth rate of Southeast Asia.
In parallel with the Data Center, the Cloud market is also changing rapidly due to the new requirements of AI. If Cloud was previously mainly seen as a solution to help businesses expand resources more flexibly, now the role of Cloud has become much broader. When AI comes into practice, businesses no longer only care about expansion capabilities, but also emphasize the issues of data location, system control capabilities, security, compliance and long-term operating costs.
Vietnam has many advantages in AI
At the event, experts said that the decisive factor does not lie in the technology itself, but in the ability to deploy in practice – from data platforms, operating models to the decision-making speed of businesses.
According to Mr. Shashidharan Jagadiswaran - senior leader in technology consulting at EY Vietnam, although Vietnam is not yet a leading market in AI by all criteria, it has a remarkable advantage in social trust, technology acceptance and policy and governance platforms. EY representatives believe that Vietnamese businesses are not lacking in willingness, but the bigger problem is implementation capacity.
In that context, models such as private cloud, hybrid cloud or sovereign cloud are mentioned more as directions suitable for the new stage. For businesses, the question is no longer just whether to apply AI or not, but how to prepare infrastructure so that this technology can operate effectively, while ensuring data security and optimizing costs in the long term. The gap between leading businesses and the rest is therefore no longer in accessing technology, but in the level of infrastructure readiness, data and deployment capacity.
