Vietnam and the chipmaker Nvidia have signed an agreement to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) research and development center in the country, marking a significant step forward in Vietnam’s plans to turn itself into a regional tech hub.
The agreement, which was signed yesterday in Hanoi in the presence of Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and visiting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, will involve the expansion of an AI data center owned by the Vietnamese military-owned Viettel Group, which already uses Nvidia technology. Nvidia also said it has acquired healthcare startup VinBrain, a unit of the prominent Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup.
Speaking at yesterday’s signing ceremony, Investment Minister Nguyen Chi Dung said that the R&D center will help develop advanced AI in the country, Bloomberg reported.
“Nvidia’s support in the AI field will help Vietnam not only achieve its development goals in high-tech industry in general and AI field in particular, but also contribute to boosting the entire Southeast Asia region to become a destination of innovation,” Dung said.
While neither side revealed the value of the deal, which Huang and Chinh later toasted with glasses of bia hoi at a Hanoi restaurant, it represents a robust vote of confidence in Vietnam’s future as a regional tech hub by one of the world’s leading AI players. In a statement yesterday, Nvidia expressed “confidence in the country’s bright artificial intelligence future.” Huang was quoted in the statement as praising Vietnam’s “vibrant ecosystem of researchers, startups, and enterprise organizations.”
According to Reuters, Chinh said that AI would help boost economic growth and aid Vietnam’s green transition. “We want to conquer not only AI, but also space and the ocean,” Chinh said. “AI will turn the sun, the wind and the waves into clean energy for us.”
Nvidia has been eyeing investments in Vietnam for some time. Visiting Hanoi late last year, Huang said that his firm was committed to investing in Vietnam and making the country its “second home.” In particular, it said it planned to expand its partnerships with Vietnam’s top tech firms and support the country in training talent for developing AI and digital infrastructure.
Last year, Nvidia began collaborating with FPT Smart Cloud – its first Vietnamese cloud partner. In April, FPT announced that it and Nvidia would build a $200 million AI “factory” using Nvidia’s graphic chip and software.
All of these activities are part of Nvidia’s broader push into Southeast Asia, where demand for data services has surged on the back of its exploding digital economy. According to a recent report, this was worth $263 billion in 2023, up from just $31 billion in 2015.
Huang traveled to Hanoi shortly after a visit to Thailand on Tuesday, where he met with Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and agreed to strengthen cooperation with her country, including help in developing its own AI infrastructure.
In January 2023, Singapore telco firm Singtel announced a partnership with Nvidia that aimed to deploy AI capabilities at its data centers across Southeast Asia. In December 2023, on the same trip that took Huang to Vietnam, he announced a $4.3 billion deal to develop Malaysia’s AI infrastructure in Malaysia, in partnership with the local conglomerate YTL. The deal will see the two sides build supercomputers using Nvidia AI chips, while YTL will utilize Nvidia’s AI cloud computing platform to build a large language model in Malay. Then, in April of this year, Nvidia announced that it is planning to build a $200 million AI center in Indonesia in partnership with local telco giant Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison.
This focus reflects the growing importance to foreign tech firms of Southeast Asia, a region with a young, upwardly-mobile, and tech-savvy population, as both a manufacturing hub and a market for tech products. The region is also attractive for Western companies looking for ways to reduce their reliance on China, as geopolitical tensions with the U.S. continue to intensify.
This year, the CEOs of the U.S. tech giants Apple and Microsoft also made tours to Southeast Asia, announcing billions of dollars in investments, particularly in data centers designed to support the expansion of AI services.