Ho Chi Minh City unveils twin US$1 billion digital-asset, AI data-centre pacts
The authorities also pledge to provide support for large-scale data centres tied to a creativity-innovation-technology complex
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[HO CHI MINH CITY] Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday (Feb 8) unveiled two cornerstone initiatives, with commitments of as much as US$1 billion each. These are a digital-asset investment fund for its International Financial Centre (VIFC), and a hyperscale artificial-intelligence (AI) and cloud-infrastructure partnership led by Abu Dhabi-based G42.
In the first agreement, the VIFC authority in Ho Chi Minh City signed a strategic cooperation deal with a consortium led by investment management firm VinaCapital and the Global On-chain Economy Alliance to study, develop and operate a digital asset fund.
Envisioned as a market-creating source of capital to build a regional-scale on-chain ecosystem within the city’s VIFC, the fund is expected to mobilise and deploy capital in multiple phases, with a target size of up to US$1 billion.
The Global On-chain Economy Alliance was launched last November in Ho Chi Minh City’s VIFC. Its members include global digital-asset companies such as Tether, Republic and Ava Labs, as well as Vietnamese players Dragon Capital, Sky Mavis and Viettel Digital Services, among others.
“For Vietnam, there is no way we can grow more than 10% per year for the next 20 years without technology. Whatever we decide to do – semiconductors, AI, cloud, big data, UI/UX, cybersecurity – we cannot go alone. We need strategic alliances.”
Truong Gia Binh, board chairman of FPT Corporation
In the second pact announced at the same investment promotion conference, G42 – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) AI champion – entered a long-term framework cooperation agreement with a consortium led by FPT Corporation and Viet Thai Group to develop AI and cloud infrastructure in Vietnam with full data sovereignty.
The collaborators will invest in, build and operate multiple international-standard hyperscale data centres in Vietnam, designed to deliver high-performance AI and cloud services to support public and private sector workloads, the companies said in their respective releases.
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Following the framework signing, they will begin finalising workload distributions, secure regulatory approvals for public cloud adoption, and start site development for the data centre infrastructure.
The plan is to deploy “significant cloud capacity” across three data centre locations in Vietnam, underpinned by up to US$1 billion in “consumption commitments”.
The companies did not disclose additional details on the size, timeline or computing capacity of the project.
Strategic alliances
In a related development, Ho Chi Minh City has pledged to provide support on policy, administrative procedures, land allocation and stable power supply for the development of large-scale data centres tied to a creativity-innovation-technology complex within the city.
The commitment was formalised through a memorandum of understanding between the city’s Department of Science and Technology and a joint investor group, which includes VinaCapital, FPT Corp and Viet Thai.
The investors will lead the efforts to attract top technology, AI, semiconductor as well as research and development firms to the southern metropolis.
“For Vietnam, there is no way we can grow more than 10 per cent per year for the next 20 years without technology,” said Truong Gia Binh, board chairman of FPT Corp, at the event.
“Whatever we decide to do – semiconductors, AI, cloud, big data, UI/UX, cybersecurity – we cannot go alone. We need strategic alliances.”
He highlighted the country’s fast-moving government, passionate technical talent pool and neutral diplomatic posture as key advantages the partnership could leverage.
FPT Corp is Vietnam’s largest listed IT services firm, and operates in more than 30 countries with deep technical and local market expertise.
The conglomerate runs two AI factories in Vietnam and Japan that provide an all-inclusive stack for an end-to-end AI product life cycle, spanning the technology’s cloud infrastructure, platforms and agents.
Meanwhile, Viet Thai is poised to contribute cross-sector expertise to the consortium through its operations in coffee, food service, retail and logistics, which encompass more than 2,000 outlets in 30 countries, including the Highlands Coffee brand.
G42, the corporates’ newest partner, is backed by sovereign wealth and Microsoft. It is the primary developer of OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure project in the UAE – a 1 gigawatt (GW) AI compute cluster in Abu Dhabi that forms part of a planned 5 GW AI campus in the country.
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