Southeast Asia is embracing sovereign AI.
The prime ministers of Thailand and Vietnam met this week with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang to discuss efforts to accelerate AI innovation in their countries.
During his visit to the region, Huang also joined Bangkok-based cloud infrastructure company SIAM.AI Cloud on stage for a hearth chat on Sovereign AI. In Vietnam, we announced NVIDIA’s collaboration with the country’s government on an AI research and development center, and NVIDIA’s acquisition of VinBrain, a health technology startup backed by Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s largest listed companies.
These events capped a year of global investment in sovereign AI, which allows countries to develop and leverage AI using their domestic computing infrastructure, data, and workforce. According to IDC, AI will contribute nearly $20 trillion to the global economy by the end of this decade.
Canada, Denmark, and Indonesia are among the countries that have announced efforts to develop sovereign AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA technology. And at the recent NVIDIA AI Summits in India and Japan, leading companies, infrastructure providers, and startups from both countries announced sovereign AI projects in areas such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Supports Thailand’s sovereign cloud infrastructure
Mr. Phan’s visit to Southeast Asia began with a meeting with Thai Prime Minister Pethunthan Shinawatra, where he discussed opportunities for developing sovereign AI in Thailand and shared memories of his childhood spent in Bangkok.
They discussed how further investment in AI education and training can help Thailand drive AI innovation in areas such as weather forecasting, climate simulation, and healthcare. NVIDIA is collaborating with dozens of local universities and startups to support the advancement of AI in the country.
Huang then spoke at the “AI Vision for Thai” event hosted by SIAM.AI Cloud, a cloud platform company that provides customers with access to virtual servers powered by NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs.
“The most important part of artificial intelligence is data, and Thailand’s data belongs to the Thai people,” Phan said during a hearth conversation with Rattanapong Wonnapachant, CEO of SIAM.AI Cloud. spoke. Huang emphasized the importance of developing sovereign AI, saying, “Thailand’s digital data encodes the knowledge, history, culture and common sense of the people. It should be harvested by your people.”
After the conversation, Wonnapachant presented the fan with a custom-made leather jacket lined with Thai silk. The companies also signed on to the NVIDIA DGX H200 system, recognizing SIAM.AI Cloud’s plans to expand its services to the NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU and NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell superchip.
Development of AI from research to industry in Vietnam
The next day, in Hanoi, Mr. Huang met with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Trinh, and NVIDIA signed a contract to build the company’s first research and development center in Vietnam. The center will focus on software development and work with Vietnamese enterprises, startups, government agencies and universities to accelerate the adoption of AI in the country.
This announcement builds on NVIDIA’s existing work with 65 universities in Vietnam and over 100 of the country’s AI startups through NVIDIA Inception, a global program designed to help startups evolve faster. Based on. NVIDIA has acquired Inception member VinBrain, a Hanoi-based company that applies AI diagnostics to multimodal health data.
While in Vietnam, Huang was named alongside AI pioneers Joshua Bengio, Jeffrey Hinton, Yan Le Kun, and Fei-Fei Lee for their “transformative contributions to the advancement of deep learning.” Winner of the 2024 VinFuture Award.
The award ceremony was hosted by the VinFuture Foundation, a non-profit organization that recognizes scientific and technological innovations that have had a significant impact on society, and was broadcast live nationwide.
“Our award today is a recognition by the VinFuture committee of the transformative power of AI to revolutionize every field of science and industry,” Huang said in his acceptance speech.
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Editor’s note: Data on the economic impact of AI can be found in the IDC press release published in September 2024, “IDC: Artificial intelligence will contribute $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030 and global GDP by 2030.” This is from a press release entitled “Promoting 3.5% of
