Vietnam’s AI Strategy: Aligning Aspirations with Adaptive Governance

The AI era—driven by Disruption, Discovery, and the Dawn of a new civilisation—is reshaping global growth, governance, and human development. AI is no longer just a technology; it is transforming cognitive capacities, decision-making, production, education, healthcare, research, public administration, and national security. Its speed and scale are unprecedented, redefining how economies compete, governments operate, and societies innovate.

For Vietnam, this transformation comes at a strategic moment. Forty years of reform have built a mature digital foundation, growing technological capabilities, and strong global partnerships. At the same time, the country aspires to reach high-income status by 2045, the centennial of its independence. AI offers a unique opportunity to accelerate productivity, modernise state capacity, and leapfrog traditional development pathways.

The AI Law, passed by Vietnam’s National Assembly on December 10, 2025 and entering into force on March 1, 2026, marks a decisive reorientation of national thinking on technology, governance, and competitiveness in the AI era

Strategic Strengths of Vietnam’s Updated AI Strategy and AI Law

1. AI as National Intellectual Infrastructure

The strategy frames AI as essential national infrastructure—on par with electricity, telecommunications or the internet. This elevates AI from a functional tool to the cognitive platform upon which Vietnam will build productivity, innovation, and resilience, effectively becoming the operating system of a future high-value economy.

2. Sovereignty, Openness, and Strategic Investment

Vietnam adopts a dual philosophy of sovereignty—in data, compute, and algorithmic infrastructure—and openness in standards, datasets, and global collaboration. Open data and open-source ecosystems are leveraged as engines of capability-building rather than vulnerabilities. To support this, the government is investing in:

• A National AI Supercomputing Centre
• A sovereign cloud for government and critical sectors
• A National AI Data Warehouse and open-data ecosystem

This infrastructure-first approach ensures compute sovereignty, enables large-scale model training, and reduces reliance on foreign hosting, while allowing the country to absorb global knowledge.

3. A Risk-Based Regulatory Framework Aligned with Global Norms

The Draft AI Law introduces a four-tier risk classification aligned with the EU AI Act but tailored to Vietnam’s context:

• Unacceptable risk: banned
• High risk: subject to registration, human oversight, and pre-deployment approval
• Medium risk: transparency and labelling required
• Low risk: maximum flexibility

This framework ensures citizen safety while improving regulatory predictability for firms.

4. Unified Governance through a National AI Authority

To address institutional fragmentation, Vietnam will establish a National AI Committee chaired by the Prime Minister, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology as the standing body. The Committee will:

• Set national standards and technical regulations
• Oversee risk-based AI compliance and enforcement
• Manage the National AI Database
• Coordinate AI policy across ministries and localities
  Direct key national projects on data infrastructure, sovereign compute, and AI public services
• Ensure coherence between security, innovation, and international integration

This governance model mirrors high-performing systems such as Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Korea’s Presidential Digital Committee, and China’s centrally coordinated AI governance, enabling unified direction, rapid decision-making, and whole-of-government alignment.

5. The State as Anchor Market and Ecosystem Builder

To accelerate domestic AI adoption and ecosystem development, the government will act as the first and largest adopter, deploying AI across public administration, healthcare, education, transport, public security, and climate risk monitoring. Incentives to foster innovation include:

• AI vouchers for SMEs
• 30–40% of the National Technology Innovation Fund allocated to AI
• AI innovation clusters in major cities
• Regulatory sandboxes
• Support for compute infrastructure and data contributions

These measures signal clear market opportunities and attract global technology leaders to invest in Vietnam.

Vietnam’s Ongoing AI Initiatives

(i) Mass AI Education (“Bình dân học vụ AI”)
 Vietnam is pursuing mass AI education to equip citizens with essential AI literacy. The programme includes universal AI assistants, AI curricula in schools and universities, and digital inclusion initiatives for rural populations, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups. Initiatives such as the NIC–Google “AI for Everyone” literacy programme exemplify efforts to make AI knowledge accessible to all segments of society

(ii) Public-sector deployment
 AI is being deployed across the public sector to improve service delivery and urban management. Chatbots assist citizens with public services, predictive traffic systems optimise flow in major cities, and AI supports tax, customs, and social insurance operations. Public health analytics and climate forecasting in the Mekong Delta further demonstrate the use of AI for societal benefit and resilience.

(iii) Private-sector R&D
 Vietnam’s private sector is actively developing AI capabilities through research and development. Companies such as Viettel, FPT, VinAI, VNPT, and TMA have established AI labs, investing in GPU clusters and sovereign data centres to strengthen domestic capacity. A rapidly growing AI startup ecosystem is also emerging, supported by partnerships with global technology leaders including Nvidia, Google, Meta, Intel, and Samsung.

(iv) Data and cloud infrastructure
Robust data and cloud infrastructure underpins AI development in Vietnam. The National AI Data Warehouse, expanding ministerial open-data platforms, and new interoperability standards provide the foundation for secure, scalable, and coordinated AI deployment across public and private sectors.

(v) Financial and institutional support
Vietnam is fostering a supportive ecosystem for AI through financial and institutional measures. The National AI Development Fund, AI vouchers for SMEs, and AI innovation zones offering tax and land incentives are complemented by unified oversight under the National AI Committee. These measures create an environment conducive to innovation, investment, and the sustainable deployment of AI across society.

Challenges: Technical Limitations, Bottlenecks, and Structural Deadlocks

 For Vietnam to move from aspiration to execution, it must identify and address three fundamentally different types of constraints.

(1) Technical limitations — “We lack tools.”
Vietnam faces several technical limitations, including insufficient compute capacity and GPU availability, limited MLOps capabilities, fragmented datasets of variable quality, and a shortage of senior AI engineering talent. While these challenges are visible, they are largely solvable through targeted investment, human capital development, and international partnerships.

(2) Operating bottlenecks — “We have tools, but the system is slow.”
Even with tools in place, operational bottlenecks slow AI adoption. Ministry-level data silos, slow procurement processes, weak interoperability, duplication of pilots, and limited monitoring and evaluation impede efficient deployment. Addressing these bottlenecks requires institutional modernisation and improved cross-agency coordination rather than additional hardware or technical resources.

(3) Structural deadlocks — “The system cannot progress without redesign.”
Structural deadlocks pose the most profound challenge. The absence of a unified National Data Layer, weak enforceability of data-sharing mandates across government, sparse sovereign compute infrastructure, institutional incentives that reward fragmentation, and the lack of a whole-of-government digital design authority all constrain progress. Taken together, these factors entrench duplication and incoherence, keeping AI initiatives trapped at the pilot stage rather than scaling system-wide.

Overcoming these systemic issues demands a shift in mindset, institutional redesign, and strong central leadership, drawing lessons from models such as Singapore’s IMDA and India’s Digital Public Infrastructure. Singapore’s IMDA  illustrates the impact of a single, authoritative digital steward that enforces interoperability, aligns data, cloud, and AI investments, and resolves inter-agency fragmentation. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure offers a complementary model, demonstrating how shared, interoperable digital rails for identity, payments, and data exchange can enable innovation and AI deployment at population scale. The shared lesson is clear: system-wide AI transformation depends on unified digital architecture, enforceable standards, shared national platforms, and incentives aligned with whole-of-government outcomes—turning AI from isolated pilots into a scalable state capability.

Conclusion

AI offers unprecedented, system-wide transformative power. It simultaneously reshapes productivity, governance, education, healthcare, security, scientific discovery, and innovation capacity—touching every province, industry, and segment of society. It is the only technology capable of compressing Vietnam’s development timeline, elevating state capability, and enabling true digital sovereignty. If embraced as a national mission, AI becomes Vietnam’s fastest and most decisive pathway to achieving its 2045 high-income vision.

Against this backdrop, Vietnam must assign far greater strategic urgency to AI than to other national priorities. Developing an international financial centre, building the Hanoi–Ho Chi Minh high-speed rail, or expanding airports and ports are all valuable initiatives—but none match AI in transformative leverage or long-term national impact. AI is not another project competing for attention; it is the central nervous system of Vietnam’s next development phase, shaping how the country will produce, compete, govern, and innovate for decades.

For a globally integrated economy like Vietnam, Singapore offers an essential lesson: digital sovereignty does not require owning every layer of hardware or cloud infrastructure. In fast-moving domains such as AI and advanced computing, insisting on full domestic ownership often leads to high costs, obsolescence, and limited capability. Singapore secures sovereignty through strategic governance, trusted partnerships with global technology leaders, and world-class talent.

Vietnam can follow this model—maximising openness while retaining control over standards, data, security, and strategic direction. This requires cultivating strategic trust with multinational partners, leveraging global platforms, and—above all—investing deeply in elite, mission-driven talent. Hardware can be imported; capability must be built. Prioritising control before scale can help safeguard national interests, but an excessively control-heavy approach may inadvertently constrain collaboration with global technology leaders, slow the development of resilient AI infrastructure, and limit the country’s ability to scale AI capabilities efficiently. Striking the right balance between control and openness will be key to sustainable, high-impact AI deployment.

Vietnam already possesses strong fundamentals: digital readiness, global partnerships, visionary leadership, and a young, dynamic population. What is required now is decisive prioritisation—accelerated investment in data infrastructure, sovereign compute, high-level human capital, institutional reform, and coordinated ecosystem design.

The window is narrow, but the opportunity is historic. If AI is elevated to a national mission, Vietnam can not only meet its 2045 goals but also shape a new era of prosperity, autonomy, and global standing in the AI-driven century.

Disclaimer

The views and recommendations expressed in this article published in February 2026 are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and position of the Tech for Good Institute.