Korean and Vietnamese telcos KT and Viettel have signed a partnership worth KRW 130bn ($94.6m) to promote AI technologies in Vietnam.

The agreement was signed between KT CEO Kim Young Shub and Viettel Group CEO Tao Duc Thang on May 27.

In terms of physical infrastructure, the partnership will include an AI-ready data center and a GPU server cluster. Details or timelines of the planned facility were not shared.

Personnel will be taken from the Global Development Center, an organization that enables South Korean businesses to outsource IT work to Vietnam.

A variety of other commitments were also made. KT will introduce its education platform, AICE, to Vietnam; form a joint venture with Viettel and expand technical training programs; help Viettel develop an AI implementation strategy; and use its existing AI technology to create a host of sovereign AI products for consumers and enterprises.

Tao said that the partnership would leverage KT’s technology and Viettel’s knowledge of the domestic market, and Kim added that it would promote comprehensive innovation in Vietnam and the Southeast Asian region.

KT, formerly Korea Telecom, is a South Korean telco. Viettel, also known as the Military Industry and Telecoms Group, is Vietnam’s state-owned and largest telco.

This is not KT’s first foray into the region. The company announced in September 2020 that it would partner with Thai Telco Jasmine Group to build a data center in Thailand, and in April of this year, revealed that a Thai-language LLM, developed with Jasmine Group and Thai AI company Upstage, had been completed. KT also helped Jasmine Group develop GPU-as-a-Service offerings.

Vietnam has hitched itself to the data center wave. In July 2024, the country's interest in the industry led it to relax rules about foreign investment and ownership of domestic data centers. Previously, foreign companies could only own up to 49 percent.

A few months later, Viettel declared its ambition to build 24 data centers in Vietnam by 2030, offering a combined capacity of 560MW.

Viettel was founded in the late 1980s as a construction firm. Operated by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence, it currently offers colocation and cloud services from five data centers across Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City. The latter location will be home to another data center by 2026, which broke ground last month and will offer 140MW of capacity at completion.

KT, formerly fully state-owned, is one of South Korea’s most prominent telcos. It is set to establish an AI Data Center Demonstration Center, and in October 2024, implemented a restructuring plan that created two new subsidiaries and slashed headcount.