Southeast Asia is embracing sovereign AI.

The prime ministers of Thailand and Vietnam this week met with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang to discuss initiatives that will accelerate AI innovation in their countries.

During his visit to the region, Huang also joined Bangkok-based cloud infrastructure company SIAM.AI Cloud onstage for a fireside chat on sovereign AI. In Vietnam, he 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 funded by Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s largest public companies.

These events capped a year of global investments in sovereign AI, the ability for countries to develop and harness AI using domestic computing infrastructure, data and workforces. AI will contribute nearly $20 trillion to the global economy through the end of the decade, according to IDC.

Canada, Denmark and Indonesia are among the countries that have announced initiatives to develop sovereign AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA technology. And at the recent NVIDIA AI Summits in India and Japan, leading enterprises, infrastructure providers and startups in both countries announced sovereign AI projects in sectors including finance, healthcare and manufacturing.

Supporting Sovereign Cloud Infrastructure in Thailand

Huang’s Southeast Asia visit kicked off with a meeting with Thailand Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, where he discussed the opportunities for sovereign AI development in Thailand and shared memories of his childhood years spent in Bangkok.

The pair discussed how further investing in AI education and training can help Thailand drive AI innovations in fields such as weather prediction, climate simulation and healthcare. NVIDIA is working with dozens of local universities and startups to support AI advancement in the country.

Huang later took the stage at an “AI Vision for Thailand” event hosted by SIAM.AI Cloud, a cloud platform company that offers customers access to virtual servers featuring NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs.

“The most important part of artificial intelligence is the data. And the data of Thailand belongs to the Thai people,” Huang said in a fireside chat with Ratanaphon Wongnapachant, CEO of SIAM.AI Cloud. Highlighting the importance of sovereign AI development, Huang said, “The digital data of Thailand encodes the knowledge, the history, the culture, the common sense of your people. It should be harvested by your people.”

Following the conversation, Wongnapachant gifted Huang a custom leather jacket lined with Thai silk. The pair also signed an NVIDIA DGX H200 system in recognition of SIAM.AI Cloud’s plans to expand its offerings to NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips.

Advancing AI From Research to Industry in Vietnam

In Hanoi the next day, Huang met with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, and NVIDIA signed an agreement to build the company’s first research and development center in the country. The center will focus on software development and collaborate with Vietnam’s enterprises, startups, government agencies and universities to accelerate AI adoption in the country.

The announcement builds on NVIDIA’s existing work with 65 universities in Vietnam and more than 100 of the country’s AI startups through NVIDIA Inception, a global program designed to help startups evolve faster. NVIDIA has acquired Inception member VinBrain, a Hanoi-based company that applies AI diagnostics to multimodal health data.

While in Vietnam, Huang also received the 2024 VinFuture Prize alongside AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann Le Cun and Fei-Fei Li for their “transformational contributions to the advancement of deep learning.”

Broadcast live nationally in the country, the awards ceremony was hosted by the VinFuture Foundation, a nonprofit that recognizes innovations in science and technology with significant societal impact.

“Our award today is recognition by the VinFuture committee of the transformative power of AI to revolutionize every field of science and every industry,” Huang said in his acceptance speech.

Learn more about sovereign AI.

Editor’s note: The data on the economic impact of AI is from IDC’s press release titled “IDC: Artificial Intelligence Will Contribute $19.9 Trillion to the Global Economy through 2030 and Drive 3.5% of Global GDP in 2030,” published in September 2024.

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