The first thing I saw was the scaffolding
I travelled to FPT City, on the edge of Da Nang, to see what a technology company builds when it stops making products and starts making a place. The first thing I noticed was not the technology. It was the scaffolding.
Large portions of the development were still under construction as I walked through it: unfinished structures, working sites and open ground between finished buildings. A district like this is usually photographed at the end. This was a plan in the middle of becoming concrete.
The second thing I noticed was the students. They were everywhere — between buildings, crossing the district's roads, gathered in the parts of it that are finished. On a weekday the life of the place came from people still studying, not from the offices that give it its name.
That combination is why FPT City is worth reporting on. It is built by FPT, one of Vietnam's largest technology companies, and inside one boundary it holds the institutions that produce technical workers, the workplaces that employ them, the housing they might live in and the amenities they might spend their evenings in: schools, a university campus, technology offices, apartment buildings, parks, a gym. The ambition is a life that does not require leaving — study, work, live and spend your free time in one connected community.
That film is the record of the visit — watch it above. What follows is what I saw on the ground, and what the record says about the plan behind it.
A campus at the centre
The clearest thing delivered is education. FPT University's Da Nang campus sits inside the urban area in Ngu Hanh Son, on a 5.1-hectare site where construction began in 2018 (FPT University), with a library, sports courts, a canteen, a dormitory and the subjects the industry asks for: software engineering, artificial intelligence and integrated circuit design.
A university alone does not make a city. Placement does: a campus inside a technology district, a short walk from the offices that will hire from it, ringed by housing from the same developer. The distance between a lecture hall and an employer is measured in footsteps.
What the plan promised
The master plan is older than most of what stands there. In 2012 the architecture firm SOM was commissioned to plan FPT City: more than 180 hectares at the edge of Da Nang, organised into a town centre, a business district and residential neighbourhoods, with a university campus, a research institute and an employee training centre — a complete urban environment for more than 30,000 people, with schools, clinics, sports facilities and a riverfront harbour onto a civic square (World Landscape Architecture).
A decade later the company put money behind the drawing. In May 2022, FPT City Danang JSC broke ground on projects worth VND2,600 billion — around $112 million — inside the urban area: a further phase of its office complex, a data centre, a second campus phase, an apartment building, a central square and a park (The Investor).
The gap you can see from the road
What has been built is substantial and unfinished at the same time, and the space between those two facts is the story. The plan describes a city for more than 30,000 people. On the ground the district reads as finished islands — the campus, offices, some housing, some amenities — with land around them still being worked on.
That is what a development looks like halfway through, and it should be said plainly rather than treated as failure or proof of success. It does change what can be claimed: any conclusion about living in FPT City is a conclusion about a place still being built. Da Nang has been here before with promises made ahead of delivery — the resort towers at Cocobay are the cautionary version of the same city (Cocobay).
Why a company builds a city instead of an office
The numbers make the strategy legible. FPT reported 2025 revenue of VND70,113 billion, of which technology contributed VND44,475 billion and education, investment and other activities VND6,132 billion (FPT annual report 2025). Education is not a charitable annex; it is a segment with its own revenue, and it feeds the others. Across the system, FPT says more than 3,700 students are enrolled in AI and semiconductor chip design programmes (FPT education report 2025).
National demand is the reason. Vietnam's government programme targets at least 50,000 university-level semiconductor personnel by 2030 — around 15,000 in chip design and 35,000 in packaging and testing (Vietnam Law & Legal Forum) — against roughly 1.9 million people working in technology today and about 7,000 chip designers. Closing that gap is a national project, and much of the training is private.
Put those pieces in one place and the logic stops being mysterious. A company that owns the school, the workplace, the housing and the gym meets a graduate at every step: tuition, salary, rent, spending. It also removes friction the rest of the sector lives with: graduates who move cities, commutes, the cost of teaching skills nobody else taught. The same instinct runs under Vietnam's platform economy: own the whole path, not one step.
The question underneath
Which brings back the question I went there with: what happens when technology companies begin building communities instead of products?
Much of it is useful: labs, classrooms and housing a company needs arrive years ahead of a municipal schedule. But a place designed around one employer's pipeline inherits that employer's risks — company towns are efficient while the company grows and exposed the moment it stops. A district built for technology workers also selects for them, and who else lives there, at what price and on what tenure, is not answered by a list of amenities.
There is a governance question too. When a private company builds the schools, the parks and the streets, who decides what the place is in twenty years? Da Nang's authorities approved this plan; the company executes it.
What the students already prove
None of that is visible from the gate, which is why the students mattered to me. A district with people in it during the day is a different thing from a render: young, in class, on foot — a version of Vietnam that exists beyond the showroom (why Vietnam isn't what you think).
Whether they stay — whether the district becomes somewhere people choose to live rather than a campus with apartments attached — is the experiment. The scaffolding will answer part of it. The rest depends on what a technology company is willing to be responsible for once the building is finished.
Watch the documentary above to see the development as I found it, construction and all.
