Viettel Group and NVIDIA have launched the Vietnam AI Open Hackathon 2026, an AI application development competition for engineers, researchers, and technology startups in Vietnam.
Vietnam AI Open Hackathon 2026 will take place from June 2 to June 12 in Da Nang. During the event, 12 selected teams will showcase AI products that have passed the qualification round, receive mentorship and technical guidance from experts, and gain access to high-performance AI infrastructure to further develop their solutions and accelerate toward real-world deployment.
The hackathon is jointly organized by Viettel, NVIDIA, and strategic partners to create opportunities for Vietnam’s AI community to transform early-stage AI ideas and products into scalable, deployable applications.
The program offers research teams and startups in Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Physical AI the opportunity to bring their ideas to life at a time when the cost of computing infrastructure and access to high-performance GPUs remain major barriers for much of Vietnam’s AI ecosystem.
As NVIDIA Cloud Partner in Vietnam, Viettel has worked alongside NVIDIA to deliver Vietnam's first enterprise-grade AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA H200 GPU, with free access now being extended to AI research teams participating in the Hackathon.
An experience on par with leading global enterprises and AI research labs
At Vietnam AI Open Hackathon 2026, research teams and startups will directly develop, train, and deploy real-world AI models - going far beyond concepts or scaled-down demos.
Viettel has deployed an infrastructure cluster consisting of 96 NVIDIA HGX H200 GPUs together with a 120 TiB high-performance storage system to simultaneously support all 12 participating teams. Each team will be allocated 8 dedicated H200 GPUs within an isolated development environment. The entire cluster has achieved 14 out of 14 criteria under the NVIDIA Cluster Readiness Checklist - NVIDIA’s operational validation standard for real-world AI infrastructure performance.
The entire AI environment - including training frameworks, inference tools, and development platforms - has been fully pre-configured. Teams are not required to invest in infrastructure or handle environment setup, allowing them to begin developing AI models immediately.
Viettel’s technical team describes the infrastructure as “virtually limitless” in terms of computing power, AI model scale, and experimental flexibility.
“Participants can focus entirely on their AI ideas without having to compromise or adjust their models due to infrastructure limitations. This is an experience typically available only at the world’s leading technology companies and AI research labs,” a Viettel representative shared.
Advancing AI sovereignty and national competitiveness
As AI increasingly becomes a new form of strategic infrastructure for nations, the ability to master computing infrastructure, data, and operational technologies is playing an increasingly important role in national competitiveness and AI sovereignty.
The entire H200 GPU system supporting the competition has been directly deployed and operated in Vietnam by Viettel engineers, covering infrastructure administration, GPU resource allocation, processing performance optimization, as well as data and access security. The system is designed to allow multiple teams to simultaneously develop large-scale AI models while still ensuring data isolation and security throughout the research and product development process.
The entire infrastructure has been independently built and operated domestically, without relying on foreign cloud computing platforms. This not only demonstrates the ability of Vietnamese engineers to master core technologies, but also contributes to strengthening Vietnam’s autonomy in data, infrastructure, and strategic computing capabilities.
In the coming period, Viettel stated that it will continue investing in AI infrastructure and expanding access to technology for startups, enterprises, and research organizations in Vietnam.
Through its collaboration with NVIDIA and global technology partners, Viettel aims to bring advanced AI technologies closer to Vietnam’s technology community while narrowing the gap in infrastructure and computing capabilities between Vietnam and major technology hubs around the world.
Viettel is committed to building an open AI platform for Vietnam’s development community, supporting the research, training, and deployment of next-generation AI models, promoting the sustainable growth of Vietnam’s AI ecosystem, and enabling Vietnamese technology enterprises to develop globally competitive products.
Through Vietnam AI Open Hackathon 2026, Viettel expects to contribute to the growth of the AI innovation ecosystem while strengthening connections among technology enterprises, experts, and AI development communities in Vietnam and around the world.
