TL;DR: CMC Technology Group chairman Nguyễn Trung Chính told Vietnam's government on June 23 that the country has everything it needs to execute its national IT mission except one thing: a formal mechanism to select, assign, and hold companies accountable for delivery. Without a national IT mission framework, Vietnam's seven designated strategic tech companies cannot be properly deployed.
What Was Discussed at the National IT Mission Steering Meeting?
On the afternoon of June 23, 2026, Prime Minister Lê Minh Hưng chaired a specialized session of the Government Steering Committee on Science, Technology, Innovation, Digital Transformation, and Project 06. The meeting connected Hanoi headquarters with 34 provinces and cities via video link and included representatives from ministries, research institutes, universities, and private tech companies.
The Prime Minister framed the discussion around a core challenge: Vietnam has identified its strategic technology priorities and published a list of core and strategic technologies, but execution remains inconsistent. The directive at the top was to identify and clear "institutional bottlenecks" that slow the path from research to product to market, and to define clear roles for each type of actor: government agencies, local authorities, research institutes, universities, and private enterprises.
What Is CMC's Role in Vietnam's National IT Mission?
CMC Technology Group is one of seven Vietnamese private technology companies that have been formally designated as strategic partners in the national technology agenda. CMC has publicly registered to take on two national missions: Cloud infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence.
These commitments were made in front of the General Secretary, representing a significant public pledge. But Nguyễn Trung Chính told the June 23 meeting directly: "The question of which company is responsible for which technology is still not clearly defined." Only the semiconductor domain has a clear assignment, with Viettel taking a leadership role. For Cloud, AI, and other listed strategic technologies, no formal assignment mechanism exists.
What Is the "Bottleneck of Bottlenecks"?
CMC's chairman called the absence of a clear mission-assignment mechanism "the bottleneck of all bottlenecks." Vietnam's strategic tech framework has a list of priorities and a list of companies. What it lacks is the connective tissue between them: a formal process to select which company handles which technology, transfer a binding mission with real scope and timeline, define what success looks like, protect the decision-makers who sign off on assignments from future accountability risk, and reward companies that deliver.
The accountability concern is not trivial. Nguyễn Trung Chính noted that government agencies and local authorities are reluctant to make technology procurement or assignment decisions today because no one can predict how those decisions will be evaluated in 5 or 10 years. Without legal clarity that protects the people who approve mission assignments, the default is inaction despite available funding.
CMC and Viettel: A Proposed Division of Labor on Semiconductors
In one of the more concrete proposals from the meeting, Nguyễn Trung Chính described an informal alignment that CMC and Viettel have already reached on semiconductors. Viettel would focus on manufacturing while CMC would focus on chip design. CMC says it has the design capability ready and that using Samsung or other international foundries for fabrication is standard practice in the global chip value chain.
This kind of role-based specialization is exactly what the proposed mission framework is meant to enable at scale, across Cloud, AI, semiconductors, and other strategic domains. Each company would commit to a specific segment, receive a formal assignment, invest accordingly, and be evaluated against defined benchmarks.
How Does Vietnam Compare to China and Korea?
Nguyễn Trung Chính referenced Huawei and Samsung as examples of what becomes possible when a government assigns clear national missions to private companies. Huawei started as a regional telecom equipment maker and grew into a global technology company in part because Beijing assigned it a specific national role in infrastructure buildout. CMC is arguing Vietnam should create a similar national IT mission assignment model.
Vietnam's stated ambition is to build companies comparable to Huawei or Samsung. The CMC chairman's position is that this is achievable if the government assigns real national IT mission tasks to real companies. Vietnam's digital-economy policy framework, including Resolution 57, sets the strategic intent but lacks the operational assignment layer CMC is now calling for.
What Does This Mean for Vietnam's Data and Technology Sector?
The outcome of this debate directly shapes which companies win the largest public-sector technology contracts in Vietnam over the next decade. For data infrastructure companies, cloud providers, and AI platform builders, government mission assignments are among the highest-value commercial relationships available in the market.
DataCore operates at the intersection of data infrastructure and financial intelligence - two segments central to Vietnam's national IT mission and digital economy agenda. As the government formalizes which private companies handle which national IT mission domains, data-layer requirements grow. See our recent coverage: supply chain data security risks and Vietnam UAV economy pilot.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Resolution 57 and why does it matter here?
Resolution 57 (Nghị quyết 57) is Vietnam's governing policy document on science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation. The June 23 meeting was held under its mandate. It defines the strategic technology priorities and the expectation that private enterprises will be central to executing them.
How many companies are designated as strategic tech partners?
Seven companies have been designated. CMC is one. Others include Viettel. The full list has not been publicly released in a single official document, but CMC's chairman referenced the group of seven in his remarks to the June 23 meeting.
What happens if the assignment mechanism is not established?
The consequence is continued underdeployment of available funding and human capital. Vietnam has the financial resources and the identified companies, but without a legal framework for assigning missions, companies cannot make long-term investment decisions and government agencies cannot approve procurement without accountability risk.
Is CMC a competitor or a potential partner for data companies like DataCore?
CMC's focus is on Cloud infrastructure and chip design at the platform level. DataCore operates at the data and intelligence layer, providing the structured datasets and APIs that cloud and AI platforms consume. The two operate at adjacent levels of the stack, which creates both partnership potential and some competitive overlap in government data infrastructure projects.
Why Vietnam's National IT Mission Needs a Mission Assignment Mechanism, Not Just Declarations
Vietnam's digital economy strategy has produced a series of well-publicized commitments: Resolution 36-NQ/TW on sea economy, Resolution 52-NQ/TW on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and most recently the Government's digital transformation program to 2025 with orientation to 2030. What Chairman Nguyen Trung Chinh of CMC argued at the June 23 steering committee session is that these declarations have not translated into a national IT mission assignment mechanism that tells specific Vietnamese technology companies which tasks to execute, with what resources, and by what deadlines.
The distinction matters enormously in practice. South Korea's Digital New Deal assigned specific tasks to Samsung, SK Telecom, and KT Corporation with defined investment obligations and government co-funding mechanisms. Japan's Society 5.0 initiative named specific companies as lead implementers for each technology pillar. In both cases, the national IT mission was not just a strategic vision but a legally structured assignment with accountability mechanisms. Vietnam's current framework articulates the vision clearly but leaves the assignment mechanism implicit, which creates coordination failures at the implementation stage.
CMC's proposal to the steering committee specifically requests that the Government formalize the mission assignment mechanism into regulatory instruments. This would give CMC and the other six identified strategic technology companies legal standing to negotiate government contracts, access priority licensing, and receive preferential treatment in public procurement, all of which are currently handled through informal relationships and political goodwill rather than a structured national IT mission framework.
The Seven Strategic Technology Companies: Who They Are and Why They Matter to the National IT Mission
The Vietnamese Government's identification of seven strategic technology companies capable of receiving a national IT mission is significant because it signals a shift from treating the tech sector as a collection of competing private firms to treating a subset of them as strategic national assets. The seven companies have not been formally gazetted as of the June 23 session, but CMC's public comments and sector analysts confirm the shortlist includes companies with demonstrated capabilities across cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, telecommunications, and semiconductor design.
CMC itself covers cloud infrastructure and chip design. Other companies on the shortlist are understood to represent telecommunications infrastructure, enterprise software, cybersecurity, and AI platforms. Together, the seven companies are intended to form the implementation backbone of Vietnam's national IT mission across four technology pillars: cloud computing infrastructure, chip design and semiconductor manufacturing support, artificial intelligence platforms, and advanced telecommunications networks.
The economic rationale for concentrating the national IT mission in seven companies rather than distributing it more broadly is scale efficiency. Each of the four pillars requires sustained multi-year investment that only companies above a certain capitalization threshold can absorb. Vietnam's technology sector, while growing rapidly, still lacks the depth of large-scale, patient capital that these investments require. Identifying seven anchor companies and giving them a formal national IT mission creates the concentrated investment profile that attracts international co-investment and technology transfer partnerships.
CMC's Cloud and Chip Focus: Where the National IT Mission Meets DataCore's Data Layer
CMC's specific focus within the proposed national IT mission is cloud infrastructure and chip design. These are foundational layers in the technology stack. Cloud infrastructure provides the compute and storage substrate on which applications and data systems run. Chip design enables Vietnam to move from importing semiconductor components to designing and eventually manufacturing them domestically, closing a critical dependency in the national technology supply chain.
DataCore operates in the data layer that sits above the cloud infrastructure that CMC aims to build. DataCore's financial data products, company intelligence, and API services depend on the availability of high-performance cloud compute, low-latency storage, and reliable network connectivity. A successful national IT mission that expands Vietnam's sovereign cloud capacity directly benefits the data products and services layer by reducing dependence on international cloud providers whose pricing and data residency terms can create compliance and cost challenges for Vietnamese data businesses.
The public-sector data infrastructure component of the national IT mission is particularly relevant. When government datasets are hosted on sovereign cloud infrastructure built by CMC and other strategic technology companies, data products like DataCore's financial and company intelligence offerings gain access to higher-quality, more frequently updated government data sources. The national IT mission is therefore not just a technology procurement story but an enabler of the data economy layer that DataCore and similar companies operate in.
Frequently Asked Questions: Vietnam National IT Mission and CMC
What is the national IT mission mechanism that CMC is requesting?
CMC is requesting that the Vietnamese Government create a formal mission assignment mechanism that designates specific strategic technology companies as responsible implementers for specific national technology infrastructure priorities. This would go beyond existing digital transformation resolutions by creating legally binding assignments with defined deliverables, resource commitments, and accountability timelines. The mechanism would give the seven identified strategic technology companies formal standing to receive government contracts, priority licensing, and co-investment support.
How many strategic technology companies has Vietnam identified for the national IT mission?
Seven Vietnamese technology companies have been identified as having the capability to receive a national IT mission assignment across cloud infrastructure, chip design, AI platforms, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and enterprise software. The list has not been formally gazetted, but CMC Chairman Nguyen Trung Chinh confirmed CMC's inclusion in public remarks at the June 23 Government steering committee session. The other six companies cover the remaining technology pillars of the national IT mission.
What technology areas does CMC cover in the national IT mission proposal?
CMC's national IT mission focus covers two primary technology areas: cloud computing infrastructure and chip design. On the cloud side, CMC operates CMC Cloud, one of Vietnam's largest domestic cloud platforms. On the chip design side, CMC has been developing domestic semiconductor design capabilities in partnership with international chip design firms. Both areas are identified in Vietnam's semiconductor strategy and digital infrastructure roadmap as critical national dependencies that require domestic capability development.
When will Vietnam's national IT mission assignment mechanism be finalized?
No formal timeline has been announced for finalizing the national IT mission assignment mechanism. The June 23 Government steering committee session was a deliberation meeting, not a decision meeting. CMC and other technology companies are expected to submit formal proposals to the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Information and Communications following the session. Regulatory instruments implementing the mechanism would require Government decree or National Assembly legislation depending on their scope.
International Models for National IT Mission Implementation That Vietnam Can Learn From
Vietnam is not the first country to face the challenge of translating technology strategy declarations into operational national IT mission assignments. Several countries have navigated this transition and produced regulatory frameworks that Vietnam's policymakers are studying closely.
South Korea's K-Cloud Project, launched in 2022, provides a direct analog. The Korean Government designated three domestic cloud providers, including KT Corporation and NAVER Cloud, as authorized national cloud infrastructure operators for government systems. Each received a formal mission assignment, a multi-year contract framework, and priority access to public-sector data migration budgets. The result was an acceleration of cloud adoption in Korean government agencies from 15% in 2022 to over 60% in 2025, measured by workloads. Vietnam's proposed national IT mission mechanism is explicitly modeled on lessons from the Korean approach, with modifications for Vietnam's smaller domestic market and different regulatory tradition.
India's National Cloud Policy and the PLI (Production Linked Incentive) scheme for semiconductors provide another reference. India's PLI scheme committed USD 10 billion in government incentives to semiconductor manufacturers willing to establish domestic fabrication capacity. The scheme created a formal mission assignment mechanism that tied incentive disbursement to specific production milestones. Vietnam's chip design component of the national IT mission borrows structural elements from the PLI approach, though at a scale appropriate to Vietnam's current semiconductor design capability level.
Singapore's Digital Connectivity Blueprint, published in June 2023, takes a different approach by focusing on subsea cable landing infrastructure and cloud interconnection nodes rather than designated national IT mission companies. Singapore's smaller size makes direct government-company mission assignments less necessary, but the regulatory framework it created for infrastructure investment commitments is studied as a model for how to create binding national IT mission obligations without creating monopolistic distortions.
What the National IT Mission Means for Vietnam's Tech Sector and Foreign Investors
The formalization of Vietnam's national IT mission into a structured assignment mechanism has implications beyond the seven designated strategic technology companies. It signals to foreign technology investors that Vietnam is moving from a general digital transformation aspiration to a specific industrial policy with designated domestic champions. This kind of policy clarity reduces investment uncertainty.
Foreign semiconductor companies looking for chip design partners in Southeast Asia will find CMC's inclusion in the national IT mission framework makes it a more attractive collaboration target. The government endorsement reduces counterparty risk and provides a long-term demand signal: CMC will have guaranteed government customers for its domestic cloud and chip design services regardless of market fluctuations. That demand certainty is exactly what foreign technology companies need when evaluating joint venture or technology transfer arrangements.
For Vietnam's broader technology startup ecosystem, the national IT mission creates both opportunity and risk. The opportunity is that a well-funded, government-backed cloud and AI infrastructure layer makes it cheaper and faster for startups to build data-intensive applications. The risk is that concentrating national IT mission resources in seven large companies could crowd out smaller players in government procurement. Policymakers will need to design the mission assignment mechanism to include provisions for startup access to national IT mission infrastructure at favorable terms, ensuring that the policy creates a rising tide rather than entrenching incumbent advantages.
