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Vietnam and chipmaker Nvidia have signed an agreement to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) research and development center in the country, marking a major step forward in Vietnam’s plans to turn itself into a regional technology hub.
The agreement, that was signed yesterday in Hanoi in the presence of Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and visiting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, will include the expansion of an AI data center owned by Vietnam’s military Viettel Group, which already uses Nvidia technology. Nvidia also said it has acquired healthcare startup VinBrain, a unit of prominent Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup.
At yesterday’s signing ceremony, Investment Minister Nguyen Chi Dung said the R&D center will help develop advanced AI in the country, Bloomberg. reported.
“Nvidia’s support in the AI field will not only help Vietnam achieve its development goals in the high-tech industry in general and AI field in particular, but also contribute to encouraging the entire Southeast Asian region to become a destination of innovation,” says Dung. said.
While neither side revealed the value of the deal, which Huang and Chinh later toasted with glasses bia hi in a restaurant in Hanoi, it represents a strong vote of confidence in Vietnam’s future as a regional technology center by one of the world’s leading AI players. In one statement yesterdayNvidia expressed confidence in the country’s bright future in artificial intelligence. Huang was quoted in the statement as praising Vietnam’s “vibrant ecosystem of researchers, startups and business organizations.”
According to ReutersChinh said 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 convert the sun, the wind and the waves into clean energy for us.”
Nvidia has been eyeing investments in Vietnam for some time. When he visited Hanoi late last year, Huang said his company was committed to invest in Vietnam and make the country his ‘second home’. In particular, it said it planned to expand its partnerships with Vietnam’s top technology companies and support the country in training talent for the development of AI and digital infrastructure.
Last year, Nvidia started working with FPT Smart Cloud – the first Vietnamese cloud partner. In April, FPT announced that they and Nvidia would build a $200 million AI “factory” using Nvidia’s graphics chip and software.
All these activities are part of Nvidia’s broader push into Southeast Asia, where demand for data services has soared due to the exploding digital economy. According to one recent reportIn 2023, this was worth $263 billion, compared to just $31 billion in 2015.
Huang traveled to Hanoi on Tuesday shortly after a visit to Thailand, where he met with Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and agreed to strengthen cooperation with her country, including help in developing its own AI infrastructure.
In January 2023, Singaporean telecom company Singtel announced a collaboration with Nvidia which aimed to deploy AI capabilities in its data centers in Southeast Asia. In December 2023, on the same trip that took Huang to Vietnam, he announced a A $4.3 billion deal to develop Malaysia’s AI infrastructure in Malaysia, in partnership with local conglomerate YTL. The deal will see the two sides build supercomputers using Nvidia AI chips, while YTL will use Nvidia’s AI cloud computing platform to build a large language model in Malay. Then, in April this year, Nvidia announced that it plans to create a $200 million AI center in Indonesia in collaboration with local telecom giant Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison.
This focus reflects the growing importance for foreign technology companies in Southeast Asia, a region with a young, upwardly mobile and tech-savvy population, as both a manufacturing center and market for tech products. The region is also attractive to Western companies looking to reduce their dependence on China as geopolitical tensions with the US continue to rise.
This year, the CEOs of US tech giants Apple and Microsoft also made trips to Southeast Asia, announcing billions of dollars in investments, mainly in data centers designed to support the expansion of AI services.