Viet Nam is at the heart of Asia's new AI trade map: HSBC

Specifically, Viet Nam's share of global trade in AI-related equipment has risen from 1.2 percent in 2015 to 12.4 percent in 2025, the largest single-economy gain in the world over that period.

In the first quarter of 2026, Taiwan recorded its first quarterly trade deficit with Viet Nam on record, and in the three months to May, Taiwanese imports from Viet Nam surged 173 percent year on year, driven overwhelmingly by machinery, electrical equipment and appliances4.

South Korea's exports to Viet Nam posted the biggest jump within ASEAN in early 2026, reflecting deep manufacturing links and Viet Nam's growing role in the final assembly of computing hardware, including AI server-related equipment.

"These figures represent a major shift. Viet Nam is no longer a low-cost assembly point at the end of someone else's supply chain but a node in a multi-directional network, importing high-value inputs from Taiwan and South Korea, adding manufacturing scale and sophistication, and exporting finished and intermediate goods back into the region and beyond. Two-way flows are deepening, and Viet Nam's position within them is strengthening", underlined Evans.

The CEO of HSBC emphasized that rise reflects policy as much as geography. The government has set out a national semiconductor strategy with ambitions to train tens of thousands of chip engineers by 2030 and has made science, technology and digital transformation a declared pillar of national development.

Global manufacturers have responded with major investments in chip packaging, testing and electronics production across the country, while partnerships with leading technology firms are bringing research and design capability onshore alongside the production lines, he added.

Viet Nam is also beginning to build the demand side of the equation. Announced FDI in data centers globally exceeded US$270 billion in 2025, with Southeast Asia claiming a growing share, and Viet Nam's young, digitally native population and rapidly formalizing enterprise sector position it to become a meaningful consumer of AI services as well as a producer of AI hardware, told Evans.

The economies that gain most from this era will be those participating at several points of the value chain at once, making the hardware, hosting the infrastructure and applying the technology to lift productivity across the wider economy, he added.

In the decade ahead, the CEO at HSBC noted that the structural forces nonetheless favor Viet Nam. Supply chains are diversifying across Asia rather than concentrating in any single location, regional agreements such as RCEP and CPTPP continue to lower frictions, and Viet Nam has shown over successive waves of investment that it can absorb capacity, move up the value chain and deliver at scale.

As Asia evolves from an export platform into an AI demand center in its own right, Viet Nam sits geographically and economically at the center of that transition, he highlighted.

If Viet Nam converts its manufacturing momentum into a genuine AI ecosystem, pairing hardware scale with skills, infrastructure and enterprise adoption, the returns will show up well beyond export receipts, in the productivity of factories, services and the daily operations of hundreds of thousands of businesses, stated Evans./.