Keppel and Sovico discuss Singapore-Vietnam subsea link

Details: John Tanner; Category: Optical & Fixed Networks; 16 December 2024; 5990 views

Singapore-based asset manager Keppel is reportedly in talks with Vietnamese conglomerate Sovico Group to develop a subsea fibre cable linking their respective home countries to meet regional demand for data centre capacity.

According to a report from Reuters on Friday, citing people familiar with the discussions, Keppel and Sovico are considering two possible plans currently on the table.

The plan favored by Sovico would establish a direct subsea link between Vietmnam and Singapore that would cost US$150 million. Meanwhile, Keppel prefers a more ambitious club-cable model in which the Singapore-Vietnam link would be a branch of a larger subsea cable system linking Singapore and Japan, the report said.

Discussions are still underway as to which plan, if any, will be adopted, and nothing has been finalised, the report noted. Both Keppel and Sovico have declined to comment on the report.

Vietnam currently connects to five international subsea cables: Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), Asia-America Gateway (AAG), Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1), TGN-Intra Asia Cable System (TGN-IA) and SEA-ME-WE-3. However, all of them experienced outage problems last year.

Earlier this year, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) approved a plan to increase the number of international cables landing in the country to at least 15 by 2030, with a minimum total capacity of 334 Tbps. That strategy aligns with the government’s ambition to build Vietnam up as a regional hotbed for data centres and AI development within the same time period.

Other international subsea cables in the pipeline for Vietnam include the Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and the Asia Direct Cable (ADC), both of which are scheduled to be ready for service in the fourth quarter of this year.

If the Keppel-Sovico deal goes through, it won’t be the first project looking to connect Singapore and Vietnam with subsea fibre. In April, Viettel Business Solutions signed a MoU with Singtel to deploy the Vietnam-Singapore Cable System (VTS), which will be designed with eight fibre pairs. The companies said VTS will add “hundreds of Tbps to Viettel's total international connectivity capacity” when it goes live in the second quarter of 2027.