APTelecom has joined Cushman & Wakefield and the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) to carry out a feasibility study for Stavian Digital Park, a proposed hyperscale data centre campus in Ho Chi Minh City that its backers say will rank among the largest planned in Southeast Asia.

Cushman & Wakefield will act as prime contractor for the study, with APTelecom brought in as a specialist subcontractor covering international connectivity, subsea cable systems and integration, carrier engagement and strategy, commercialisation and digital infrastructure considerations.

The USTDA signed an agreement with Vietnamese technology company Stavian Hightech Infrastructure JSC last week to fund the feasibility work. According to the agency, Stavian Digital Park is designed to attract hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure operators as its first major customers, especially US-based firms — although the park will be open to "any trusted telecommunications provider." That wording signals Washington's intent to steer Indo-Pacific digital infrastructure buildouts toward equipment and partners it considers secure, a policy priority that has shaped US-backed subsea cable projects across the region.

Stavian said it had selected Cushman & Wakefield to conduct the study, which will cover the full suite of ancillary infrastructure the campus requires, including power supply, cooling and connectivity. The real estate services firm will also develop a procurement framework, a financial model and a master plan for the site, and will establish criteria requiring customers to use secure equipment.

"Connectivity is an increasingly important part of the data centre development equation, particularly as campuses scale to support hyperscale, cloud and AI requirements. As digital infrastructure developments become larger and more complex, the ability to align data centre planning with resilient connectivity infrastructure becomes increasingly important," said Andrew Green, head of Cushman & Wakefield's Asia Pacific data centre group.

Eric Handa, co-founder and CEO of APTelecom, framed the engagement as a showcase for the firms' combined capabilities. "Stavian Digital Park is a great opportunity for us to demonstrate how our combined capabilities can create greater value for clients across the digital infrastructure market," he said in a statement.

Stavian Group chairman and CEO Tony Dinh said the park would equip Vietnam with next-generation infrastructure required by modern AI computing systems and would significantly expand the country's data centre capacity — a market that remains small relative to regional peers such as Singapore and Malaysia but is attracting growing investor interest on the strength of Vietnam's fibre rollout and young digital population.

"Through Stavian Digital Park, we aim to help Vietnam attract more international technology investment and become a regional hub for AI and cloud computing," Dinh said.

The project marks the second USTDA-funded feasibility study involving APTelecom in recent weeks. In September, the agency said it would fund a study for a new subsea cable system linking Thailand with the US via Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, with Thailand's state-owned National Telecom (NT) selecting APTelecom to conduct the work.

Neither the USTDA nor the companies disclosed the value of the funding agreement, a target capacity for the campus, or a construction timeline. The feasibility study's outputs — the master plan, financial model and procurement framework — will determine whether Stavian Digital Park moves from proposal to build, with the USTDA's backing positioning US vendors and operators as preferred early tenants.