‘Vietnam Puts AI at the Center of Its Economic Strategy,’ Deputy Director of the Vietnam National Innovation Center Says at NVIDIA AI Day Ho Chi Minh City

AI is making advancements across the globe and across industries, creating impacts that will last across time.

To help foster AI innovation for everyone, everywhere, NVIDIA hosts specialized events — including AI Days — for and in different pockets of the world. These events draw in hundreds of enthusiasts, developers, researchers and startups to explore the latest technologies making AI breakthroughs possible.

The latest stop: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

On Tuesday, more than 800 attendees joined NVIDIA AI Day Ho Chi Minh City to learn about sovereign AI — including 15 breakout sections on physical, agentic and generative AI, as well as AI factories that are enabling innovation at the regional, national and global scales.

Chuck Tybur, head of the NVIDIA Partner Network, gave opening remarks, highlighting the importance of sovereign AI. He said key components for sovereign AI success include:

• An AI imperative, understanding domestic AI capabilities are critical to economic growth, national security, cultural preservation and innovation
• An AI ecosystem of developers, scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, enterprises and government organizations
• An AI-ready workforce comprising a wide range of AI skills and talent
• AI models and data tailored to a region’s language, culture and needs
• AI factories that are locally owned, operated and governed

Ho Chi Minh City showcases “dynamic economic growth, relentless innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit,” Tybur said at the conference.

“Vietnam puts AI at the center of its economic strategy,” added Vo Xuan Hoai, deputy director of the Vietnam National Innovation Center. The center supports and develops the nation’s startup and innovation ecosystem, contributing to the development of science and technology in the region.

The latest AI trends in Vietnam showcase how the technology is driving digital transformation across government services, finance, smart manufacturing, healthcare and creative industries.

“Vietnamese people have achieved remarkable excellence in STEM fields, with many young students excelling in mathematics, science and technology,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, during his visit to Vietnam last year. “This provides a solid foundation for developing future technologies.”

The numbers help showcase the Vietnam AI ecosystem’s ongoing growth:

In addition to breakout sessions by topic, the event included meetups for 10 startups, NVIDIA Partner Network members and NVIDIA Cloud Partners.

Plus, hands-on NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute training labs covered:

• The fundamentals of agentic AI: A brief introduction to agent abstraction, emerging frameworks and key insights shaping the latest AI and software innovations.
• Generative AI model compression: How to distill, quantize and prune for efficient large language models (LLMs), optimized inference and lower deployment costs. The session also discussed potential trade-offs in accuracy, latency and hardware using NVIDIA solutions.

Vietnam-based NVIDIA partners and customers are advancing the nation’s role in the next industrial revolution fueled by AI.

• GreenNode is building large-scale Vietnamese LLMs with high-quality, culturally tailored datasets and scalable, secure deployment capabilities.
• FPT is showcasing end-to-end AI development with a domestic AI factory, using NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPUs for secure, accelerated model training, fine-tuning and deployment of enterprise AI agents.
• VNPT AI is advancing its AI capabilities by integrating the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit with in-house AI models including for computer vision, automatic speech recognition, LLMs for real-time video analytics and intelligent video-query applications.
• Zalo is developing sovereign LLMs tailored to the country’s unique linguistic and cultural needs.

Looking forward, Vietnam aims to build three national data centers and be among the top four leading AI nations in Southeast Asia by 2030.

“Nowadays, in the tech era, sovereignty also extends to technology,” said Tuan Minh Pham, CEO of FPT Software and executive vice president of FPT Corporation. “Our mission is not only to develop the country or protect our independence in cyberspace but also to ensure national security, the privacy of our people and resilience against external factors. I believe that AI and sovereign AI are very important to propel Vietnam further and support the country in speed and scalability to catch up with developed nations.”

Next up: Attendees of NVIDIA AI Day Tokyo, running Sept. 24-25, will discover the latest AI breakthroughs, connect with peers and experts, and get involved in opportunities for innovation.