Thailand has the potential to become a hub for data centres and cloud services in Southeast Asia, due partly to the development of more facilities in this sector, says Gulf Development Plc, Thailand’s largest energy company by market value and a telecom operator. Gulf is among several companies that have announced plans to venture into the data centre sector to serve growing demand in the country. The company aims to develop more data centres after recently opening a data centre with an IT load of 20 megawatts.
“The new data centres will have a combined capacity of 300MW,” Yupapin Wangviwat, chief financial officer of Gulf, said on Wednesday.
She did not provide further details concerning the new data centre projects.
Data centres play an important role in supporting work in the private and state sectors, including medical services at hospitals.
“Work on image recognition screening applications and patients’ medical records now mainly relies on data centres,” said Ms Yupapin.
Image recognition screening applications use artificial intelligence to analyse images and identify anomalies. Data centres provide computational and storage infrastructure for these apps.
Gulf chief executive Sarath Ratanavadi said earlier that the company would prefer to establish a data centre business in the Eastern Economic Corridor, which will be developed into Thailand’s high-tech industrial hub.
This location could help make Thailand a regional hub for data centres and cloud services, said Ms Yupapin, as the country sits in a central location within mainland Southeast Asia, and it is connected to many other countries.
Other factors include investment incentives granted by the Board of Investment to companies investing in data centre businesses, adequate electricity distribution and a water system used for cooling networks of computers, she said.
Gulf expects its total revenue to grow by 25% this year, up from 124.5 billion baht in 2024, driven by additional electricity generation capacity in Thailand, higher power tariff payments from electricity users in the US and Germany as well as earnings from liquified natural gas and telecom businesses.
The firm is allocating 23 billion baht to support its renewable energy and digital technology projects this year.
credit : https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/3094174/gulf-sees-thailand-as-data-centre-cloud-services-hub
