Every year, over 1,300 international visitors come to the university for research purposes and more than 800 members of the university go abroad. There are also numerous international cooperations, including many with Germany and with the DAAD in particular. The Vietnamese-German Centre (VDZ) was built in 1999 with German support; the DAAD Regional Office has been located at the VDZ since 2003.

At HUST alone, over 60 DAAD/Germany alumni are involved in university activities. They work as lecturers or researchers. A number of promising research activities are also being undertaken jointly with many other universities, including TU Dresden, the University of Würzburg and the University of Hanover among others.

In 2016, the S(ustainable) D(evelopment) G(oals) Graduate School at HUST was launched in cooperation with Vietnam National University Hanoi on the Vietnamese side and the University of Rostock and the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) on the German side. The DAAD is supporting this large cooperation project initially for five years using funding from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, BMZ) amounting to nearly 500,000 euros per year. The DAAD is also funding a bilateral academic exchange programme with HUST.