Investing in developing semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence

In mid-March 2025, business leaders, scientists, and leading technology experts from around the world gathered at the National Innovation Center (NIC) in Hoa Lac to attend a series of events at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Semiconductors (AISC) 2025, organized by NIC in collaboration with Aitomatic (USA).

This is the first international event to focus on the intersection of two technologies that are transforming the world, AI and the semiconductor industry. Mr. Christopher Nguyen, CEO of Aitomatic, said that the intersection of AI and semiconductors is becoming a symbiotic relationship; in which, AI plays a role in promoting the automation of the semiconductor manufacturing process and vice versa, AI cannot develop without semiconductors.

Currently, AI has become a mandatory tool for some high-tech manufacturing industries, especially in semiconductor chip manufacturing factories. Mr. Christopher Nguyen shared: Compared to heart surgery or aircraft manufacturing techniques, the semiconductor chip manufacturing process requires thousands of times higher precision, just one parameter such as pressure, fuel, air, humidity... not meeting the standards will lead to defective products.

If AI is applied in the plasma processing step, these parameters will be controlled to ensure almost absolute accuracy. AI tools are also capable of synthesizing human experience and knowledge accumulated over many years to quickly diagnose product defects, helping to create smaller, smarter, more efficient chips; thereby helping to improve the productivity and quality of semiconductor chip products. In addition, the development speed of AI and semiconductors is very fast.

In fact, the semiconductor industry and AI are transforming many industries and socio-economic sectors, especially in high-tech industries. For example, in the automotive industry, Senior Vice President of Automotive, Mr. Daniel Weyl said: Automakers are moving towards applying AI to consolidate functions into a number of central controllers that can handle many different tasks instead of building distributed control units (ECUs) based on hardware; thereby creating more flexible cars and saving costs by reducing design complexity, improving overall productivity.

In the maritime sector, AI is also applied to automate the analysis and synthesis of new regulations, build compliance checklists, support crew training and has the ability to process big data collected from ships to optimize itineraries and monitor in real time. This is a very important factor contributing to solving the major difficulties facing the maritime industry today such as labor shortage, data overload, etc.

In many discussion sessions of the AISC 2025 Conference, experts and scientists agreed that Vietnam is becoming a destination for global research and development (R&D) centers. Evidence of this is that NIC and several large Vietnamese corporations such as FPT and CMC have signed strategic cooperation agreements with NVIDIA, Meta, Google, etc.

A new step forward in Vietnam’s international cooperation on AI is the announcement of the implementation of the ViGen project, with an effort to create a high-quality open-source Vietnamese dataset for training, evaluating and thereby improving the efficiency of large language models (LLMs). Mr. Vo Xuan Hoai, Deputy Director of NIC, said that the ViGen project will provide large and high-quality datasets in Vietnamese, build AI models that support naturally and comprehensively from the core to unlock the potential of AI applications in Vietnam.

To seize the opportunity to rise in the global supply chain of the semiconductor and AI industries, Mr. Christopher Nguyen recommended: Vietnam needs to focus on training high-quality human resources for industries in the direction of close cooperation between businesses, educational and training institutions and the Government.

In addition, it is necessary to continue investing in technology infrastructure with a focus on high-tech zones, large data centers and the formation of a complete ecosystem in enterprises. Another very important factor is the need for transparent and equal "playgrounds" for enterprises and investors and the completion of legal policies to support investment activities of enterprises in the semiconductor and AI industries.