Nikkei Asia said that Alibaba is currently renting servers from telecommunications service providers Viettel and VNPT. From 2022, the law will take effect, requiring foreign technology companies to store data domestically.

According to Dang Minh Tam, head of solutions architect at Alibaba Cloud, the company uses “colocation” - a term that refers to renting servers from local data center operators, and backing up data to dedicated servers located across the geographic region, from Taiwan (China) to Singapore.

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Alibaba will build a data center in Vietnam.

The plan to build its own data center in Vietnam is therefore aimed at meeting the needs of one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. Details on the cost and timeline have yet to be officially announced. Typically, building a data center can cost more than $1 billion.

Besides cost considerations, security and information control are also factors that make companies like Alibaba want to build separate data centers.

Leif Schneider, a partner at the law firm Luther, said liability can be an issue when multiple companies are involved in managing the same data. Contracts should be clear “so you always know who is taking the risk and what the responsibilities are,” Schneider said at a data center and cloud conference in Ho Chi Minh City last week.

Viettel IDC predicts that the Vietnamese data center market will grow 15% per year in the near future and could be even higher if companies like Alibaba enter the market.

(According to Nikkei Asia)

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