[4][5] Thu Duc City covers 211.56 km², the population as of 2019 was 1,013,795 inhabitants.

[8] This new city-within-city model has been used by many places in the world including financial center Canary Wharf in London, Silicon Valley in the United States, Gangnam in Seoul or Pudong in Shanghai, etc.

It was suggested that Thu Duc should be given autonomy in decision making and policy incentives to develop innovation capacity to improve competitiveness like what China did to Shenzhen, whose economy now is larger than Hong Kong's.

[15] There are eight innovation centers in total of Thu Duc city:[16][17][18][19][20][21] Thu Duc City will contribute one third of Ho Chi Minh City's gross regional domestic product (GRDP) and account for 7 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP), which is only behind Hanoi's GRDP in scale but higher than that of Binh Duong and Dong Nai.

[15][22] During the existence of South Vietnam, it was the location of Thu Duc Military Academy.