Where will the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure investment go in Southeast Asia? Vietnam is competing with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia for it. The closing panel of the Vietnam Cloud & Datacenter Convention in Ho Chi Minh City on August 20, 2026 looked at what Vietnam still has to build. It was titled “The Road to 2030: Can Vietnam Lead ASEAN’s AI Infrastructure Boom?” (ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.) Vladimir Kangin, Founder and CEO of IPTP Networks, spoke on the panel. This article draws on his answers and adds what we operate and are building in Vietnam.<\/p>
Our view in one line: Vietnam’s edge by 2030 depends on three things working together: abundant, resilient international connectivity, compute capacity connected to it, and power that investors can count on. Power is the most likely to hold the other two back.<\/p>
Vietnam’s most credible edge by 2030 is less about any single asset and more about a stack of capabilities. That stack lowers latency, risk and integration cost for cloud providers, hyperscalers (the largest cloud operators) and enterprises. <\/p>
That stack rests on three things:<\/p>
Three policy areas can raise the value of all three: shared national platforms, 5G for industry and clearer rules for new infrastructure. They follow after connectivity and compute.<\/p>
Vietnam’s digital infrastructure strategy (Decision 1132\/QĐ-TTg, issued in October 2024) calls for six new international subsea cables by 2030. New cables help most when they are paired with a well-planned domestic backbone and fast upgrades at the landing points. With both, Vietnam can offer hyperscalers, content networks and enterprises a landing zone with ready-to-use connectivity. That can cut delivery time and cost compared with markets where cross-connectivity is already saturated. It also keeps cross-border data movement practical for AI workloads and adds resilience against congestion and route bottlenecks.<\/p>
That is the layer IPTP Networks works in. Section 4 describes our network.<\/p>
The strategy also calls for hyperscale data centers and digital hubs by 2030. The edge comes when these sites are connected to internet exchanges, fiber and power, and when deployment timelines are standardized and predictable. Against peers, advantage often comes from cutting the time to get a permit and the time to connect. Investors fund more than buildings. They fund operating timelines and reliable access to interconnection points and service providers.<\/p>
A national platform layer is shared digital infrastructure that government and business can both build on, such as electronic ID and authentication, digital addresses, data sharing and integration, e-payment, e-invoice and e-certificate services. It reduces duplication, and firms that build on these platforms can onboard faster. A connected data ecosystem raises the value of cloud and data center investment, because enterprises and public agencies get reusable data services instead of a custom integration each time.<\/p>
The strategy targets 5G coverage for 99 percent of the population by 2030. Coverage on a map is not the advantage. What counts is a network that industrial and Internet of Things (IoT) users can depend on: enough capacity, low latency and consistent performance. If 5G expansion is paired with industrial partnerships and standardized IoT and security requirements, Vietnam can win investment in smart factories, logistics automation and other latency-sensitive deployments.<\/p>
Regulatory sandboxes let companies test new services under regulator oversight. Together with faster standards-setting for technologies such as AI, blockchain and IoT, they can make Vietnam more attractive for services built around infrastructure. Examples are computing close to users (edge computing), managed IoT platforms and compliant cloud offerings. Clearer rules lower the risk for investors. Stronger network, equipment and service-quality standards can also make Vietnamese offerings look more dependable to global buyers.<\/p>
Put together, these pieces reinforce each other. More international fiber capacity supports scalable data center and cloud capacity, which supports national data and transaction platforms and connectivity that enterprises can use. At each step, latency, cost, integration effort and deployment time can fall for investors.<\/p>
In our view, international connectivity, subsea cables and network resilience will decide whether Vietnam becomes a regional AI hub. AI is limited by how much reliable, low-latency traffic can move between compute and data across borders. Where the servers sit is only part of the answer.<\/p>
To attract AI training and inference workloads, Vietnam has to work as a practical extension of regional and global compute.<\/p>
If international routes are congested or expensive, an AI ecosystem can still form, but it tends to stay domestic and smaller, because moving data across borders becomes the bottleneck.<\/p>
Da Nang is not a new location for us. It is already a point of presence (PoP, a site where our network connects to others) in our Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone, with direct access to the APG cable system, which lands there. Backbone latency from Da Nang is roughly 12 milliseconds (ms) to Singapore, 5.5 ms to Hanoi and 9 ms to Hong Kong, all one-way. That is about 24, 11 and 18 ms round trip. Figures like these decide which workloads a Da Nang site can serve beyond Vietnam.<\/p>
Subsea cables carry about 99 percent of international data traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union. That makes them the physical layer that decides three things:<\/p>
Cost per bit at scale strongly influences whether hyperscalers see Vietnam as cost-competitive for placement and replication. The plan for six new cables by 2030 aims to keep connectivity from becoming a bottleneck for Vietnam’s AI and cloud ambitions.<\/p>
Cloud providers, content delivery networks, research clusters and financial ecosystems all depend on continuity, and downtime is expensive. Rerouting time decides how quickly a network can absorb a failure without major performance loss. Some cable paths also carry geopolitical and route risk.<\/p>
Capacity alone is not enough. Buyers need route diversity and the operational ability to reroute, so that one outage does not collapse the quality of international connectivity. Vietnam has six active subsea cable systems: AAG, APG, AAE-1, IA, SJC2 and ADC. They land at three points on the coast: Da Nang (APG), Quy Nhon (SJC2 and ADC) and Vung Tau (AAG, AAE-1 and IA). In 2026, faults on four of them (SJC2, AAE-1, AAG and IA) disrupted about 30 percent of the country’s international internet traffic, according to Data Center Dynamics. In 2024, three cables (IA, APG and AAE-1) were also hit by outages.<\/p>