FPT invests US$200 million to launch AI services in Japan

"We not only provide human resources but also GPU (graphics processing unit) computing infrastructure to create the cutting-edge AI solutions for the Japanese market. AI is one of our growth engines," said Pham Minh Tuan, chief executive officer and president of FPT Corp's tech subsidiary FPT Software, in an interview in Tokyo.

The newswire revealed that FPT agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with chipmaker Nvidia of the United States in April for the AI factory to be built in Vietnam and for further cooperation on a global scale. Starting the new services in Japan is therefore in line with the partnership between the two companies.

"We will launch the services by January or February next year. That's why we need to buy and deploy the hardware from Nvidia and start running the data center by December of this year," said Tuan, who is also the executive vice president of FPT Corp, the holding company.

The main target of AI services is the digital transformation of financial institutions in the Far East nation. "They have a lot of data. How they can monetize that data and create new value by mining the data is significant. AI and the latest technologies with large language models or large vision models can support customers in realizing their dreams, but it requires a lot of computing power resources," Tuan explained.

Some US$200 million of investment, equivalent to the volume spent on AI factories in Vietnam and which he called "the first commitment", will be disbursed by the end of the year, he added.

The company will also expand its workforce in the Japanese market from 3,500 to 5,000 by next year, which fully aligns with the large-scale nature of the investment, he noted.