February 6th, the Vietnamese corporation Viettel put into operation the NVIDIA DGX B200 supercomputer. This is the first such machine in the country. It runs on Blackwell chips – the most powerful solution from NVIDIA, which recently entered the global market. The supercomputer is located in Hanoi, in the country's largest data center, Viettel Hoa Lac.
Technical Specifications in Numbers
The main value of this "megacomputer" lies in its speed of working with neural networks.
- Performance: 1.5 exaflops. To put it in perspective: one exaflop is a quintillion operations per second. An ordinary computer would take thousands of years to perform the work that this machine does in moments.
- Memory and Speed: The total video memory is 1.4 TB, and the data exchange rate reaches 64 terabytes per second. This allows for the training of huge language models in a couple of days, which previously took months.
- Efficiency: Compared to previous models from NVIDIA (H100), this complex is 15 times faster at providing AI-generated answers to users and 3 times faster at training on new data.
Why Spend Resources on This?
For Vietnam, this is not just an image project, but a solution to specific problems. The government plans to take fourth place among ASEAN countries in terms of AI development by 2030, and this is impossible without its own capabilities.
- National Security and Public Sector: Instead of using American or Chinese cloud services, Vietnam will train neural networks on its own base. This ensures that confidential data of citizens, companies, and government agencies will not leave the country.
- Economy and Business: Viettel is launching a "GPU as a service" model. Any Vietnamese IT company or startup will be able to rent the supercomputer's power remotely. This saves businesses from having to spend huge budgets on purchasing their own equipment.
- Social Tasks: Resources will be directed towards the analysis of medical data (rapid diagnostics from images) and accurate weather forecasting. For Vietnam, which suffers from annual typhoons, calculating the movement of a storm with kilometer accuracy can save thousands of lives.
The data center itself, where the supercomputer is located, has a power of 30 MW and is protected according to the international Tier III standard. This means that all power and cooling systems are duplicated. Even if an accident occurs in the city or one line is disconnected for repair, the "brain" of the machine will continue to work without pauses.