Vietnam digital economy forecast to reach US$49 billion in 2026
Teradata executive Josh Abbott says businesses face data and cost barriers as they expand their use of artificial intelligence.
Vietnam is expected to record digital-economy gross merchandise value of US$49 billion in 2026, representing annual growth of 20%, according to the 2026 e-Conomy SEA report. The study, produced by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, identified e-commerce as the leading contributor to growth. Other contributors included online media and travel, alongside food delivery and ride-hailing.
Josh Abbott, Teradata’s Vice President for Asia-Pacific and Japan, told VnEconomy that Vietnam’s skilled workforce and companies’ growing knowledge of AI and data were helping develop the market. However, he said businesses needed better-quality data, stronger governance and solutions to implementation costs to translate that potential into economic value. Data preparedness was a particular concern for agentic AI, whose systems can perform multiple steps independently.
Abbott also described increasing interest in infrastructure that mixes public cloud services with on-premises systems. He said tighter rules on where information is held and processed were influencing those choices. The shift reflected changes in workload allocation, he said, rather than companies giving up cloud computing altogether.
Drawing on experience across different markets, Abbott said some critical-infrastructure organisations must remain operational for around 90 days during cloud-service outages. On-premises infrastructure could help meet such requirements. He added that graphics processing unit costs and demand were prompting even companies with strong finances to put some GPU capacity on their own premises for AI applications.
