How CMC’s US$250m Data Centre Plans to Lead in Green Tech

CMC Corporation is investing US$250m into a new data centre in Ho Chi Minh City, forming part of a national strategy to push Vietnam further into the global technology space.

With formal approval from the Saigon Hi-Tech Park (SHTP) Management Board, the CMC Hyperscale Data Centre is designed to underpin Vietnam’s AI development, cloud services and large-scale data systems.

But at the core of the project is a focus on sustainable, energy-conscious digital infrastructure.

Green power in Vietnam’s digital ambition

Located on the eastern side of Ho Chi Minh City, CMC describes the facility as Vietnam’s "AI Heart".

This positioning reflects the centre’s role in supporting AI operations, cybersecurity, big data processing and enterprise computing.

Such services require scalable and energy-intensive hardware and CMC’s approach is to make that infrastructure more sustainable from the ground up.

The data centre starts operations with 30 megawatts (MW) of available power and is built to scale up to 120 MW.

This level of capacity is critical for handling compute-heavy AI models and complex analytics.

However, the company is clear that expansion will not come at the cost of energy efficiency or sustainability.

CMC is committing to green infrastructure from day one.

The company states it will prioritise renewable energy sources and follow international green data centre standards.

Measures such as energy-efficient hardware and water-saving technologies have been embedded into the site’s long-term environmental strategy.

This is aimed at avoiding the common sustainability problems of hyperscale data operations.

A digital twin, an exact virtual replica of the physical site, is also part of the build.

This model allows for real-time tracking and operational optimisation, reducing energy waste and ensuring efficient load distribution.

It helps CMC keep environmental impact under control while maintaining high performance.

Future-ready infrastructure

CMC’s new facility is also a testing ground for next-generation connectivity.

The design includes several high-speed, low-latency networking technologies.

These include XGS-PON (10 Gigabit-capable Symmetrical Passive Optical Network), which supports faster and symmetrical internet connections and SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), which improves the control and management of wide-area networks.

"AI will usher in a new era in which it profoundly affects society, the economy and all facets of daily life," says Nguyen Trung Ching, Chairman and Executive President of CMC Corporation.

"In CMC's development strategy and business plan, artificial intelligence is becoming essential.

"Specifically, we anticipate that by 2028, the Corporation would employ 15,000 IT engineers, of which 6,000 are AI engineers, making up 40% of our human resources."

SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) and 800G DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) optical transmission are also built into the core.

These ensure encrypted, high-capacity data transmission between points within the network, further reinforcing CMC’s ambition to offer secure, scalable computing infrastructure with minimal delays.

Crucially, this technology stack supports the entire CMC ecosystem. Existing Tier III-certified data centres and a GPU (graphics processing unit) farm equipped with ore than 1,000 NVIDIA GH200 chips are part of the wider infrastructure network.

These GPUs are designed for AI workloads, offering parallel processing capacity essential for training and running large language models (LLMs) and computer vision systems.

CMC’s wholly developed CMC Cloud service is a key delivery vehicle.

Built entirely in Vietnam, it offers enterprise-level cloud solutions and integrates directly with the new hyperscale centre.

This allows for scalable service provision across sectors and regions.

AI innovation with environmental impact in mind

From a sustainability perspective, one of the main differentiators of this project is its support for Vietnam’s internal digital needs and its outward-facing technology ambitions.

CMC’s platform, branded as C.OpenAI, is already showing results.

It includes 25 core AI technologies, with applications such as C.Face (facial recognition), C.OCR (SmartDocs for optical character recognition) and CLS (a legal assistant tool).

CMC ATI’s CATI-VLM model placed in the top 12 globally in the 2025 Robust Reading Competition, outscoring Amazon Textract, GPT-4 Vision Turbo and Baidu.