Is Vietnam the next source for CIO inspiration?

Integral to success

Underpinning all this is massive investment made in education from FPT Corporation, the company that’s become synonymous with Vietnamese advances in its tech sector. FPT, or Financing and Promoting Technology, is a concise summary of what the state-backed organization is attempting to achieve for itself and the wider national economy.

As the dominant IT service company in Vietnam with over 48,000 staff and almost $2.2 billion in annual revenue, FPT spreads its interests across telecoms, datacenter hosting, software development and, increasingly, AI. Its presence is hard to miss when travelling through the country, and the company even presides over universities that feed into the national plan to become a digital leader.

Linus Lai, chief analyst of IDC in the ANZ region, applauds Vietnam’s progress, fuelled by FPT’s software development capabilities, and its advances in LLMs and gen AI.

“It seems FPT has a high concentration of PhDs, led by chief AI officer Nguyen Xuan Phong,” he says. “FPT claims to be the number-one AI center in Vietnam, staffed by 1,000 AI professionals. They’ve also recently reached an agreement with Nvidia and have the largest Nvidia cluster in Southeast Asia with up to 400 teraflops of performance.”

The story of Vietnam this century is one of rapid progress on the back of a determined attempt to modernize since joining the World Trade Organization in 2008. Electronics exports have boomed and one next wave may be R&D and a rising relevance in higher-margin IT services. 

“Where the Philippines largely majors in BPO, due to their mastery of the English language and close links to American interests, Vietnam has been open to external IT services trade with Japan, US, Europe, and its close neighbors,” adds Lai. “Based on its trajectory, we see similarities between Japan and Vietnam in its science and engineering capabilities. It’s beginning to differentiate itself on the global scale based on its openness in its business culture, and willingness to invest in research and development.”