Google to invest $1 billion in Thailand data center and AI push

Google announced Monday it’s investing 36 billion Thai baht ($1 billion) into Thailand for the creation of a new data center and expansion of the country’s cloud infrastructure.

The move marks a ramp-up of Google’s expansion in Asia, putting artificial intelligence at the heart of its international push at a time when it’s facing intense competition from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI.

The investment would see the company create its first data center in Thailand, Google said in a post on its Thailand blog Monday.

Data centers are the backbone of today’s modern digital economy, fueling the rise of cloud computing technology which enables access to storage, compute, and analytics services via the internet.

Google said that its debut Thai data center will be located in Chonburi, an eastern province of Thailand.

The facility 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 Thailand, Jackie Wang, Google’s Thailand country lead, said in the blog post, according to an English translation taken via Google Translate.

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.

“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 is the second-largest in Southeast Asia and is expected to reach $50 billion by 2025, Google, Temasek and Bain & Company said in a 2023 report by e-Conomy SEA.

Google is investing in the region with a focus on AI as it faces pressure from its rival tech giants when it comes to both AI and cloud computing.

The internet giant currently dominates globally when it comes to its search engine technology. But the firm has increasingly come under threat from the surge of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

It’s a technology that Google helped pioneer through its early research on so-called transformer models, which are the bedrock of many of the most popular generative AI models.

However, today Google finds itself under threat from the use of generative AI products, like ChatGPT and Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, to find information about things.

Last week, Google filed an antitrust lawsuit with the European Commission accusing Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the cloud industry to undermine competition.