Vietnamese investment in Laos didn’t just grow in the first half of 2026. Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put first-quarter investment at $582 million, up 4.2 times year-on-year, with cumulative Vietnamese investment reaching $6.6 billion across 289 projects. An earlier count from March, reported by the Asia News Network, put cumulative Vietnamese state-enterprise investment at $6.21 billion across 276 projects. Vietnamese capital is concentrated in mining, hydropower and energy, and high-value agriculture: sectors where Vietnamese firms already have regional experience and where the investment tends to be smaller-ticket and faster to deploy than the multi-billion-dollar rail and grid projects China has built. In other words, ideally, Vietnamese investment becomes a real hedge against predatory Chinese business practices.