Thailand aims to become Southeast Asia’s data centre hub

The Thailand Data Centre Council (TDCC) is pushing to establish Thailand as the central hub for data centres in Southeast Asia in the next three years, amid rising competition with foreign data centre providers joining the market. From the United States, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and India, global cloud data centre operators are turning their investment focus towards Thailand.

The Board of Investment (BoI) confirms that NextDC, an Australian data centre operator, obtained BoI approval for a 13.7 billion baht investment in a new hyperscale data centre in Bangkok. The Asian data centre leader, CtrlS Datacenters, has also leased a land plot in the Eastern Economic Corridor of Digital (EECd) in Chon Buri for 50 years. CtrlS Datacentres (Thailand) Co received BoI approval for a 5-billion-baht investment in this new hyperscale data centre.

Thai Internet and Cloud Service Provider Association President Morakot Kultumyothin mentioned plans to encourage greater participation from its members this year to enhance competitiveness and industry promotion. The association comprises 17 members, with the majority of them being Thai-owned service providers.

Despite the burgeoning competition, Wanchai Vach-shevadumrong, Deputy Managing Director of Internet Thailand (INET), identifies hidden opportunities. He predicts a continued demand for cloud services as businesses seek to cut costs, increase automation, and speed up digital transformation.

However, the company faces a pricing war due to the emergence of new foreign cloud service providers and the existing local ones. INET is targeting premium customers, offering a cloud service bundled with a cybersecurity service.

In related news, the TDCC recently appointed Thosaphol Pengsom as its first chairman. The five founding members of the TDCC jointly established the council in January 2024, aiming to uplift the data centre sector as a critical industry for Thailand’s digital infrastructure.

Thosaphol noted the importance of fostering an environment that supports the expansion of data centre capacity for major cloud service providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

According to TDCC, the APAC data centre co-location market supported 10,233 megawatts of IT capacity in 2023, roughly 40% of the global market. Projections by Structure Research forecast this capacity to surge to 19,069MW by 2028. However, Thailand, despite having the region’s second-largest GDP, faces potential policy and regulatory challenges that may hinder its participation in the growing artificial intelligence (AI) economy, reported Bangkok Post.