A Third Path for AI Beyond the US-China Binary (www.noemamag.com)

Vietnam’s FPT Corp. has launched a national AI alliance and opened its “core tech stack” — signaling a deliberate, third path of AI sovereignty that refuses to pick sides between U.S. proprietary platforms and China’s centralized model. FPT pledged an open national sandbox, local AI education initiatives and a goal to build a domestically trained GPT-style model, framing AI as a matter of national authorship rather than dependency. The move exemplifies a broader shift in AI geopolitics: the contest is increasingly about infrastructure (stacks, model weights, data regimes, cloud dependencies) rather than binary ideology. Technically, FPT’s stack centers on its AI Factory HPC hub equipped with thousands of Nvidia H100/H200 GPUs running Nvidia AI Enterprise and NeMo, feeding FPT Smart Cloud for localized, containerized deployments. Platforms like AI Studio (fine-tuning on DeepSeek-R1, Llama 3.3, domain data) and AI Inference (catalogue of pretrained models via API) bridge research to production. Strategic partnerships (Mila, Nvidia, regional investors, and cross-border vendors) and modular design let Vietnam localize data residency while still tapping global tech. The approach highlights both opportunity—composable, governable AI tailored to local language and sector needs—and friction, from export controls and chip access to licensing regimes that may constrain a genuinely nonaligned stack.