A few days after announcing the construction of an AI data center in Johor, NVIDIA has announced to build a base in Vietnam to develop the country's semiconductor industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the company's plans to set up a center in the country. This base will be used as a place to attract talents from all over the world to contribute to the development of Vietnam's semiconductor ecosystem. Through this base, Vietnam will become their chip manufacturing center in Southeast Asia and at the same time make it an alternative to the current world chip manufacturing center which is Taiwan.
NVIDIA already has a good relationship with several Vietnamese companies. Vinfast for example agreed to use the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin self-driving system on their electric vehicles. With chips produced in-house in Vietnam, it will launch the vehicle production supply chain.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a blow to manufacturers who only produce the necessary components in China. The closure of factories in China due to the zero-Covid policy caused production to be severely affected at the global level which has not yet fully recovered after three years.
For Malaysia, the selection of Vietnam as NVIDIA's chip production center is certainly disappointing because our country is one of the major global chip production powers (in eighth place). The fact is that Vietnam is now seen as a country with a more advanced and dynamic manufacturing sector.