A multinational technology company headquartered in Shenzhen announced plans to invest THB700 million in establishing its third data centre in Thailand next year, as part of its support for Thailand to become the digital hub of ASEAN.
The amount is equivalent to the total investment in its first data centre, in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) in 2018, and the second in Bangkok, in 2019. The announcement was made by the chief executive of the Thailand branch of the tech powerhouse, in an address to the “Powering Digital Thailand 2021: Huawei Cloud and Connect” conference at Centara Grand at CentralWorld on 11 November 2020.
He stated that the company has its mission, which is to grow in Thailand and contribute to Thailand. With its end-to-end solution technology and global experiences and expertise, the firm believes it can contribute more to try to support Thailand to be the regional hub.
The tech giant has seen the tremendous progress made in the growth of the digital economy in Thailand, starting with Thailand’s 4.0 policy, which reflected the country’s strong ambition to become a digital leader in the region, Mr Deng said. However, Thailand’s digital economy currently contributed less than 20% to GDP, and there was still a big space to promote digital technology adoption and development in the country.
The digital economy could also help with the country’s economic recovery, especially now it had been further damaged by the pandemic. Thailand’s digital infrastructure is now ready to be empowered into a leading position, thanks to the government’s efforts to accelerate the adoption of 5G through 5G licence auctions in February 2020. The company is confident of Thailand’s potential to become ASEAN’s first digital hub, and this will help the country’s digital economy contribute to 30% of the GDP by 2030.
The data centre market
OpenGov Asia recently reported that Asia Pacific data centre and cloud providers are among the fastest-growing in the world, with cloud revenue far outstripping data centre revenue. In particular, forecasts by the firm pegged cloud revenue in the region at four times more than data centre revenue over the four years to the beginning of 2025, with cloud revenue projected to increase by 87% and data centre revenue by 22%.
The report looked at the market landscape for data centres and cloud services in the region, namely Southeast Asia countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as Australia, China (and Hong Kong), Japan South Korea, and Taiwan.
According to the report, there is one sq m of data centre space for every 522 people in the Asia Pacific region, with hubs such as Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore having a notably higher data centre floor space “per head” than the rest of Asia.
China has the largest data centre space in the APAC (and second-largest globally), accounting for 43% of data centre space in the region with 1.7 million sq m of space forecast for 2021. Elsewhere, the next largest data centre market in APAC is Australia and Japan with 11% each, with Singapore in fourth place with 10%. Singapore is understood to be under a moratorium on new data centres that could last until 2021, though it is unclear if it is still in effect.
Smaller data centre markets are poised for further growth – with South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam forecast to have the highest increase.
