It is reported that Vietnamese technology giant FPT Group plans to invest US$200 million to expand its business in Japan. It is expected to provide AI cloud computing services to Japanese companies and provide corresponding solutions for their digital transformation at the beginning of next year. The funds will be disbursed by the end of this year at the latest.

In this cooperation, FPT Software (the technology subsidiary of FPT Group) will provide not only human resources but also the necessary infrastructure for GPU computing to create the most cutting-edge AI solutions for the Japanese market and use AI as one of the company's growth engines.

In April this year, FPT announced a comprehensive strategic partnership with NVIDIA to build an AI factory in Vietnam and further cooperate globally.

"We will launch this series of services in January or February next year, so the company needs to purchase and deploy NVIDIA hardware by December this year and officially operate the data center by the end of the year," said Pham Minh Tuan, CEO and president of FPT Software. In addition, the company will also look for suitable data center rental space in Japan for the deployment of new high-specification cloud services and AI solution businesses.

For FPT Software, AI services are mainly aimed at the digital transformation of Japanese financial institutions. These financial institutions have a lot of data and will mine this data to monetize and create new value. The latest technologies such as AI and large language models and large visual models can help customers realize their dreams. The launch of new services in Japan will also fully meet the huge computing resources required for AI computing.

FPT Japan, a 100% subsidiary of FPT Software, recently opened a new office in Tokyo. Pham Minh Tuan attended the opening ceremony, and the company's customers and Vietnamese masters in Tokyo were also invited to attend.

Regarding FPT Japan's recruitment plan, the company revealed that as of March this year, the company had 3,500 employees and was still recruiting, and it is expected to expand its staff team to 5,000 in 2025. The latest data shows that 63% of FPT Japan's current employees are Vietnamese and 31% are Japanese.

It is understood that FPT Group was established in 1988 with software development as its core business. Later, it gradually expanded to the fields of telecommunications, education and investment. It also built a data center and established a university in its own country. Shortly after its establishment, the company began to provide support for Japan's offshore information technology business.

In 2023, FPT Group established a new automotive business department and is committed to becoming a world-class automotive industry software product and service provider, using it as the next growth pillar. In 2023, the group's total revenue was 52.618 trillion VND, an increase of 19.6% over the same period last year; after-tax profit was 7.788 trillion VND, a year-on-year increase of 20.0%. By the end of 2023, the market value reached 122.044 trillion VND, a year-on-year increase of 44.7%.

At present, FPT Group has completed the transformation from "support service provider" to "providing IT services directly to customers"; at the same time, the international technology business has also expanded rapidly. Last year, for the first time, it obtained annual revenue of more than US$1 billion in IT services in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific countries such as China and Japan.

Since the company was founded, Japan has been the main market of FPT Group, and its office network also covers the whole country of Japan, including Sapporo, Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and Okinawa. In 2023, Japan accounted for 38% of the total revenue of its software department. The group's major customers are also spread across different industries, such as KDDI, Itochu Corporation, Panasonic ITS, Takenaka Komu, Fujifilm and Microsoft Japan.

Pham Minh Tuan hopes that FPT Japan will become a top 20 company in Japan and still use Japan as the largest market for FPT Software, contributing 35%-50% in the future, balancing the share of other markets. In March this year, FPT Group acquired NAC, a Tokyo-based technology company that provides market consulting, engineering services and system integration to strengthen its business in Japan.

According to statistics, the Vietnamese population in Japan has increased significantly to 565,000, almost eight times that of 10 years ago, most of whom are technical interns, skilled workers and students, and FPT Group is one of the main beneficiaries of this situation. Since more than half of Vietnamese employees have studied or lived in Japan before joining, most of them can speak fluent Japanese.

But the challenge is that the group is currently less well-known in the Japanese recruitment market and potential new customers. Pham Minh Tuan said: "We strive to keep the proportion of non-Vietnamese in FPT Japan at 30%-40%, and we need to get more Japanese to join FPT." In addition, FPT Group has been actively providing Japanese college students with internship programs at FPT University in Vietnam to enhance its social visibility in Japan.