Google announced on Monday that it is investing 36 billion Thai baht ($1 billion) in Thailand to build a new data center and expand the country’s cloud infrastructure.
This move signifies Google’s increased focus on expanding its presence in Asia, with artificial intelligence (AI) at the core of its global strategy, as it faces growing competition from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI.
According to a post on Google’s Thailand blog, the investment includes the establishment of the company’s first data center in Thailand.
Data centers play a crucial role in the modern digital economy, supporting cloud computing technologies that provide access to storage, computing, and analytics services over the internet.
Google’s first data center in Thailand will be located in Chonburi, an eastern province. The facility will help meet the rising demand for Google Cloud and AI innovations, as well as popular services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Workspace, said Jackie Wang, Google’s Thailand country lead, in the blog post, as translated from Thai.
Beyond developing infrastructure, the $1 billion investment from Google into Thailand is “also about unlocking new opportunities for businesses, educators and all Thais,” Wang said in the blog post.
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“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, the second-largest in Southeast Asia, is projected to reach $50 billion by 2025, according to a 2023 report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company for e-Conomy SEA.
As Google invests in the region, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), it faces growing competition from rival tech giants in both AI and cloud computing.
While Google remains a global leader in search engine technology, it is increasingly challenged by the rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google was a pioneer in AI research, particularly with the development of transformer models, which form the foundation of many popular generative AI technologies today.
However, the company now faces competition from AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine, which are increasingly being used to search for information.
In response to competitive pressures, last week Google filed an antitrust lawsuit with the European Commission, accusing Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the cloud industry to stifle competition.
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