Artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the global economic order, but not every country can participate in this race in the same way. For Vietnam, the issue is not to chase AI at all costs, but to choose the right things to do, the right place to stand, and the right way to move forward. Over the past decade, AI has shifted from an emerging technology field to a central axis of competition in the global economy. The AI race is no longer scattered but organized along a closed value chain, from foundational inputs, hardware, computing infrastructure, and data to foundation models and applications and services. In that picture, the United States and China are holding overwhelming advantages, shaping a new global competitive landscape. The global AI landscape is highly concentrated and strongly polarized Global investment data showed that AI development is becoming increasingly concentrated and sharply differentiated. Across the entire AI value chain—from hardware, computing infrastructure, and data to foundation models and applications—most resources are concentrated in only a handful of countries. The most prominent are the United States and China, which occupy central positions both in terms of investment scale and their ability to dominate the segments that generate […]