Vietnam distributor says Nvidia A100 chips not sold to Vietnamese AI project that claims to be ChatGPT rival
Nvidia’s official distributor in Vietnam said on Monday it has never sold A100 graphics chips to a local producer who claims to be developing an AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT.
Pham Minh Huu Tien, a TV show producer and pharmacist known as ‘Duoc Si Tien,’ said at a recent press conference that his company had built a system called ChatDST using 12 Nvidia A100 GPUs, totaling 960 GB of memory.
He claimed the model’s capacity to be twice that of ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by U.S. firm OpenAI.
Pham Minh Huu Tien displays technical specifications of ChatDST, an AI chatbot that he says will launch in October 2025, in this image taken from his Facebook page.
The claim drew skepticism on social media and in local media reports.
LeadTek, the exclusive distributor of Nvidia’s professional GPUs in Vietnam, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper it had never provided A100 chips to Tien or his team.
Pham Minh Huu Tien displays technical specifications of ChatDST, an AI chatbot that he says will launch in October 2025, in this image taken from his Facebook page.
“The A100 is on a U.S. government restricted list and is not officially distributed in Vietnam,” a LeadTek representative said.
The A100 chip, released in 2020, is widely used in data centers to train large AI models but is subject to U.S. export controls in certain markets, including Vietnam.
Tuoi Tre could not independently verify Tien’s claims.
Requests for comment from his company were not immediately answered.
Bao Anh - Hoai Phuong - Duc Thien / Tuoi Tre News