Google has just announced a substantial investment of 36 billion Thai baht (approximately NZD $1.7 billion) in Thailand to establish a new data centre and boost the country’s cloud infrastructure.
This signifies the tech giant’s expansion of operations in Asia, with a particular focus on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its global strategy amid increasing competition from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI.
The investment will facilitate the construction of Google’s inaugural data centre in Thailand. These data centres are essential to the modern digital economy, as it enables the growth of cloud computing technologies that provide access to storage, computing power, and analytical services over the internet.
Google’s new facility will be located in Chonburi, an eastern province of Thailand. According to Jackie Wang, Google’s country lead for Thailand, this data centre will “help support the growing demand for Google Cloud and AI innovations, as well as popular Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps and Google Workspace” in the region.
In addition to infrastructure development, Wang noted that this investment is also about “unlocking new opportunities for businesses, educators and all Thais.”
“As AI transforms industries, it is more important than ever to educate and upskill Thais to use this technology,” she added.
Thailand’s digital economy ranks as the second-largest in Southeast Asia and is projected to reach USD $50 billion by 2025, according to a 2023 report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company.
Google remains a leader globally in search engine technology, but it is increasingly challenged by the rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google has been a pioneer in generative AI through its research on transformer models, which are foundational to many leading generative AI applications. However, it now competes with products like ChatGPT and Perplexity for information retrieval.
Recently, Google filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the company of abusing its dominant position in the cloud industry to stifle competition.