Vietnam picked ten technologies it intends to own

Vietnam has spent two decades describing technology it wanted to buy. The list published this year is the first serious attempt to name the technology it intends to own.

Decision 21/2026/QĐ-TTg, signed on 30 April and in force since 1 July, sets out ten strategic technology groups and thirty strategic products. It replaces the 2025 list, and it is shorter: eleven groups became ten, thirty-five products became thirty. The cuts are the point. A list that includes everything funds nothing.

The ten groups are digital technology — AI, big data, digital twins, cloud, edge, IoT and blockchain — next-generation mobile networks, robotics and automation, advanced biotechnology and biomedicine, advanced energy and materials, semiconductors, cybersecurity and quantum, sea, ocean and subsurface technology, aerospace, and high-speed and urban rail.

Three of those groups had no predecessor at all. Semiconductors, quantum and low-orbit satellites are now national priorities in a country that does not yet fabricate a leading-edge chip, does not operate a quantum computer, and has launched a handful of small satellites. High-speed rail is newer still: the Ministry of Construction has said Vietnam has no experience designing, building, manufacturing or maintaining such a system.

What the state actually committed

A list is a preference. The programme behind it is the commitment, and it arrived three months later. Decision 1493/QĐ-TTg, approved on 6 August, set targets for 2030: master at least four of the ten technologies, commercialise at least fifteen strategic products — five of them in regional or international markets — reach forty percent localisation on commercialised products, and build at least thirty companies that own strategic technology, ten of them inside global value chains.

Money is moving, in Vietnamese public-sector amounts. The Ministry of Science and Technology said in August it had received 31 dossiers for strategic technology projects with a combined proposed budget of about 9.7 trillion dong, roughly 370 million dollars. Nine national key laboratories have been funded. A separate list of seventy high technologies, published in May, tells ministries where to concentrate procurement.

There is also something to point at that already exists. Vietnamese large language models are not hypothetical: Zalo, FPT, Viettel, VNPT and CMC have all built Vietnamese-language models, and a Vietnamese LLM is the first entry on the product list. That matters for the politics of the programme. A strategy that starts with something a domestic company can already sell survives its first budget cycle.

The gap between a list and a capability

Semiconductors are the clearest test. A strategic product list can order a specialised chip; it cannot conjure a fab, a process node or the several thousand engineers a packaging plant needs. Vietnam's realistic position is assembly, testing and design — the back end — and the decision does not pretend otherwise. It lists specialised chips as a product to develop, not a node to leapfrog.

High-speed rail is the second test, and the harder one. The Ministry of Construction told the drafting process that Vietnam lacks experience in design, construction, component manufacturing, and operations and maintenance, and that the technology will initially have to be imported before any of it is localised. Naming rail a strategic technology is therefore a procurement strategy as much as a research one: the bet is that a 1,500-kilometre project creates enough demand to force a domestic supply chain into existence.

The third test is people. The programme's own numbers — thirty companies, ten in global chains, four technologies mastered — describe a labour market that does not exist yet. The state has moved on this too: a separate scheme funds up to one billion dong a year for outstanding doctoral researchers working on core technology.

Why the shrink matters more than the additions

The 2025 list had eleven groups and thirty-five products. This one has ten and thirty, and the deletions were deliberate: a strategy that funds everything is a strategy that funds nothing, and the ministries that lost their line item know it.

What is genuinely new is the framing. Earlier Vietnamese technology policy was about adoption — build the data centre, buy the equipment, train the users. This set is about the ability to make the thing, and it comes with an explicit gate in 2030 that can be checked: four technologies, fifteen products, forty percent local content.

Those are modest numbers against the ambition in the preamble. They are also the first Vietnamese technology targets in years that a journalist can audit.

Source: VnExpress, "10 công nghệ chiến lược Việt Nam muốn làm chủ" (11 November 2026); Decision 21/2026/QĐ-TTg (30 April 2026); Decision 1493/QĐ-TTg (6 August 2026); Ministry of Science and Technology.

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