Vietnam has spent two decades being the place where other companies build things. This week its most senior leaders told two of the companies that made it that way that assembly is no longer enough.
In Hanoi on August 27, Communist Party General Secretary and President To Lam received Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon and pressed the American chip designer to expand well beyond its existing engineering footprint in the country — into artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, 5G and 6G, data centres and next-generation connectivity infrastructure. Hours later, Prime Minister Le Minh Hung delivered a parallel message to Samsung Electronics CEO Roh Tae-moon: keep investing, keep training, and start pulling far more Vietnamese firms into the global supply chain.
Amon supplied the headline. Qualcomm, according to the government account of the meeting carried by state news agency VNA, is working toward making Vietnam the company third-largest AI research and development centre worldwide. The company already runs an R&D centre in Hanoi and has spent roughly 20 years in the market, with partnerships including telecom operator Viettel and the former handset maker VinSmart. Amon described Vietnam as an emerging high-tech manufacturing, research, innovation and digital economy hub of growing importance in the region, and noted that Qualcomm has invested more than 100 billion US dollars in R&D globally — the pool from which any Vietnamese expansion would be funded.
To Lam framed the ask in the language of Vietnam current economic program. The country, he said, is pivoting toward a self-reliant, innovation-driven, sustainable and globally integrated growth model, with science, technology, innovation, digital transformation and AI designated as the key drivers. He was explicit about the terms of trade: Vietnam is prioritising investment that brings technology transfer and upgrades workforce quality, and he asked Qualcomm to deepen collaboration with Vietnamese universities, research institutes and enterprises rather than simply hiring locally.
The Samsung conversation ran on the same logic but with much larger sunk numbers behind it. Samsung has invested about 24 billion US dollars in Vietnam to date, and exports from its Vietnamese mobile phone manufacturing entities reached 500 billion US dollars by the end of June, 17 years after production began, according to the government statement. Hung told Roh that Vietnam wants Samsung to remain a critical bridge and partner in enhancing technological capability, building industries and integrating deeper into global value chains. Roh replied that Samsung plans additional investment and expanded training in Vietnam, and said the company is working with the government to help more local firms qualify as suppliers to its global operations.
That last point is the one Hanoi cares about most. Samsung has said it will add roughly 1 billion US dollars of fresh capital in Vietnam during 2026, on top of two large 2026 commitments already on the books: a 1.28 billion US dollar expansion by its materials arm and a semiconductor-related project valued at about 4.08 billion US dollars. The capital keeps arriving. What has been slower to arrive is Vietnamese ownership of the higher-margin steps.
Analysis
The meetings matter less as investment news than as a readable signal of how a mid-sized economy is trying to convert manufacturing scale into AI-era leverage — and how narrow the window is.
Vietnam national semiconductor strategy, issued in 2024, targets at least 100 chip design companies, one fabrication plant and 10 packaging-and-test facilities by 2030, with industry revenue above 25 billion US dollars a year. The binding constraint is people, not policy: the accompanying workforce program commits roughly 1.08 billion US dollars in blended public and private funding to train 50,000 semiconductor engineers by 2030, including a minimum of 5,000 with deep AI specialisation. Those two documents explain exactly why To Lam kept returning to technology transfer and training rather than headline capex figures. Vietnam already knows how to attract factories. It does not yet know how to attract the design teams that decide what those factories build.
Qualcomm interest is not charity. The company has bet its next decade on on-device and edge AI — inference running on phones, PCs, cars and industrial equipment rather than in hyperscale data centres. That roadmap needs enormous volumes of relatively affordable systems and software engineering, and it needs those engineers close to the manufacturing base. Vietnam offers both, plus a diplomatic position that has become unusually valuable: a country the United States treats as a Comprehensive Strategic Partner since 2023, that Korea treats as a core production base, and that is not China. For a chip designer navigating export controls and supply-chain politics simultaneously, a third AI R&D hub in Hanoi is a hedge as much as an expansion.
The scepticism is warranted, though. Statements issued after leader-level receptions are aspirations, not signed capital commitments. Qualcomm gave no headcount, no timeline and no dollar figure for the Vietnamese hub, and third-largest is a relative measure that could be satisfied by a few hundred engineers depending on where the bar sits after San Diego and Hyderabad. Samsung, meanwhile, has been promising deeper local supplier integration in Vietnam for years, and the persistent gap between Vietnamese assembly labour and Vietnamese-owned component value is the reason the prime minister had to raise it again.
Watch three things over the next two quarters. First, whether Qualcomm converts the Hanoi framing into a specific investment licence with hiring targets — Vietnamese provincial authorities publish these, and the number will be more informative than any ministerial readout. Second, whether the 4.08 billion US dollar Samsung semiconductor project moves from announced to under construction, which would mark the first genuine step up the value chain rather than sideways along it. Third, power. Every AI R&D and data centre commitment made in Hanoi this week assumes electricity and grid capacity that Vietnam has not yet finished building. If that constraint bites in 2027, the engineers will get hired somewhere else.
“An emerging high-tech manufacturing, research, innovation and digital economy hub of growing importance in the region.”— Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm