On December 5, 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stood in Hanoi and signed a cooperation agreement with the Vietnamese government to jointly establish an AI Research and Development Center and an AI Data Center in the country. For a company whose chips power most of the world's AI workloads, choosing Vietnam as a strategic base was the clearest signal yet that the country is being written into the global AI supply chain.
The December 2024 Agreement
The agreement did not come out of nowhere. A month earlier, in November 2024, NVIDIA acquired VinBrain, a Vingroup subsidiary based in Hanoi that builds AI-powered medical diagnostics on multimodal health data. It was reportedly NVIDIA's first acquisition in Vietnam, and post-acquisition VinBrain operates as part of NVIDIA rather than as an independent entity. Buying a Vietnamese AI company, rather than simply opening an office, told the market that the depth of local AI engineering justified permanent investment.
The VinBrain Acquisition
Reuters also reported plans for an AI factory in Hanoi valued at roughly $200 million, built alongside the government partnership. In the period since, NVIDIA has stated at an investment conference in Hanoi that its operations in Vietnam grew by nearly 130 percent between 2025 and 2026. The company is actively hiring AI researchers in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a strong indicator of where it expects its next generation of AI engineering to come from.
What 130% Growth Looks Like on the Ground
The infrastructure is following the talent. Vietnam's data center market is expanding quickly, with capacity estimated around 525 MW in 2025 and projected to approach 950 MW in the following years. Domestic players are building AI-ready facilities in parallel. Viettel is developing hyperscale data centers with NVIDIA infrastructure, and FPT launched its own GPU cloud in 2025. For anyone building AI products with Vietnamese teams, training and inference capacity is moving closer to home.
The Infrastructure Following the Talent
For businesses, the near-term effect is a tightening market for experienced AI engineers. When NVIDIA, FPT, and Viettel all expand AI hiring in the same two cities, salaries for machine learning specialists rise and hiring timelines stretch. Companies that wait until they need AI capability to start looking will pay more and wait longer than those that secure capacity early. The practical move is to treat AI talent like any other engineering capacity: plan for it, budget for it, and partner where in-house hiring does not scale.
What This Means for Businesses Building AI
This is exactly the environment Retech Solutions builds in. From our base in Ho Chi Minh City we help companies add AI capability to existing business software, from retrieval-augmented generation systems to agentic AI architectures, using the same talent pool that has drawn NVIDIA, and applying the pragmatic engineering standards the country's new AI employers demand. If you are planning an AI initiative for 2026, tell us about your project and we will map the realistic options.
