Vietnam and the chipmaker Nvidia have signed an settlement to determine a man-made intelligence (AI) analysis and growth middle within the nation, marking a major step ahead in Vietnam’s plans to show itself right into a regional tech hub.
The settlement, which was signed yesterday in Hanoi within the presence of Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and visiting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, will contain the enlargement of an AI information middle owned by the Vietnamese military-owned Viettel Group, which already makes use of Nvidia know-how. Nvidia additionally mentioned it has acquired healthcare startup VinBrain, a unit of the distinguished Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup.
Talking at yesterday’s signing ceremony, Funding Minister Nguyen Chi Dung mentioned that the R&D middle will assist develop superior AI within the nation, Bloomberg reported.
“Nvidia’s help within the AI subject will assist Vietnam not solely obtain its growth objectives in high-tech trade usually and AI subject specifically, but additionally contribute to boosting all the Southeast Asia area to develop into a vacation spot of innovation,” Dung mentioned.
Whereas neither aspect revealed the worth of the deal, which Huang and Chinh later toasted with glasses of bia hoi at a Hanoi restaurant, it represents a strong vote of confidence in Vietnam’s future as a regional tech hub by one of many world’s main AI gamers. In a statement yesterday, Nvidia expressed “confidence within the nation’s vibrant synthetic intelligence future.” Huang was quoted within the assertion as praising Vietnam’s “vibrant ecosystem of researchers, startups, and enterprise organizations.”
In line with Reuters, Chinh mentioned that AI would assist enhance financial progress and assist Vietnam’s inexperienced transition. “We wish to conquer not solely AI, but additionally house and the ocean,” Chinh mentioned. “AI will flip the solar, the wind and the waves into clear power for us.”
Nvidia has been eyeing investments in Vietnam for a while. Visiting Hanoi late final yr, Huang mentioned that his agency was committed to investing in Vietnam and making the nation its “second residence.” Particularly, it mentioned it deliberate to broaden its partnerships with Vietnam’s prime tech corporations and help the nation in coaching expertise for creating AI and digital infrastructure.
Final yr, Nvidia started collaborating with FPT Sensible Cloud – its first Vietnamese cloud associate. In April, FPT announced that it and Nvidia would construct a $200 million AI “manufacturing unit” utilizing Nvidia’s graphic chip and software program.
All of those actions are a part of Nvidia’s broader push into Southeast Asia, the place demand for information companies has surged on the again of its exploding digital economic system. In line with a recent report, this was price $263 billion in 2023, up from simply $31 billion in 2015.
Huang traveled to Hanoi shortly after a go to to Thailand on Tuesday, the place he met with Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and agreed to strengthen cooperation together with her nation, together with assist in creating its personal AI infrastructure.
In January 2023, Singapore telco agency Singtel introduced a partnership with Nvidia that aimed to deploy AI capabilities at its information facilities throughout Southeast Asia. In December 2023, on the identical journey that took Huang to Vietnam, he introduced a $4.3 billion deal to develop Malaysia’s AI infrastructure in Malaysia, in partnership with the native conglomerate YTL. The deal will see the 2 sides construct supercomputers utilizing Nvidia AI chips, whereas YTL will make the most of Nvidia’s AI cloud computing platform to construct a big language mannequin in Malay. Then, in April of this yr, Nvidia introduced that it’s planning to construct a $200 million AI middle in Indonesia in partnership with native telco large Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison.
This focus displays the rising significance to international tech corporations of Southeast Asia, a area with a younger, upwardly-mobile, and tech-savvy inhabitants, as each a producing hub and a marketplace for tech merchandise. The area can also be enticing for Western corporations in search of methods to scale back their reliance on China, as geopolitical tensions with the U.S. proceed to accentuate.
This yr, the CEOs of the U.S. tech giants Apple and Microsoft additionally made excursions to Southeast Asia, saying billions of {dollars} in investments, significantly in information facilities designed to help the enlargement of AI companies.
