Riding AI ‘gold rush’: Vietnam tungsten giant courts foreign investors ahead of planned mainboard listing 

[HANOI] In every gold rush, the biggest gains are not always captured by those digging for gold, but by those supplying the tools that make the digging possible. 

Executives at Masan High-Tech Materials said they see the current artificial intelligence boom in similar terms, positioning tungsten as part of the “picks and shovels” behind the AI “gold rush” rather than a headline-grabbing end product. 

Critical to industrial production from chipmaking to armour-piercing ammunitions, tungsten is now in an upcycle. The prices of ammonium paratungstate (APT) – an intermediate tungsten product – surged nearly 10 times over the past year to surpass US$3,100 per metric tonne unit (mtu).