United States’s Nvidia set to discuss chip cooperation in Vietnam next week

The southeast Asian country, which is home to large chip assembling factories including Intel’s biggest globally, is trying to expand into chip designing and possibly chip-making.

Jensen Huang, president and chief executive of Nvidia, will on Monday meet representatives from the Vietnamese government and Vietnamese companies to discuss ways “to boost the semiconductor industry” in Vietnam and “Nvidia’s potential partnership with Vietnamese tech firms,” the invitation letter to the private event said.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment said in a statement that Huang and other Nvidia’s executives will have a work meeting at the Vietnam National Innovation Center, or NIC Hoa Lac, in Hanoi on Monday.

Huang will meet with ministry, city and industrial parks’ leaders, as well as representatives of Vietnamese industrial corporations, it said, adding that some companies in Vietnam’s semiconductor business like FPT and state-owned Viettel will attend the event.

FPT, Vingroup, the parent company of electric vehicles maker VinFast and Viettel said they would attend the meeting on Monday with Nvidia but declined to comment about any possible deal.

An industry source familiar with the preparations of the meeting said Nvidia was expected to agree on a tech transfer deal with at least one Vietnamese company.

Nvidia, which makes AI chips and graphics processing units, has already partnered with Vietnam’s leading tech companies to deploy AI in the cloud, automotive and healthcare industries, a document published by the White House in September showed when Washington upgraded diplomatic relations with Vietnam.