Thailand Approves $2.7B in Data Centre Projects With Capacity of 347MW

The government of Thailand on Monday approved three data centre projects representing a total investment of THB 90.9 billion ($2.7 billion) as the kingdom continues to attract digital infrastructure players.

The trio of facilities by three different operators will have a combined IT load capacity of 347 megawatts, the country’s Board of Investment said in a release. The largest of the projects, a THB 72.7 billion data centre with a planned 300MW of capacity, is a development of Beijing Haoyang Cloud Data Technology, a mainland China platform whose investors include US private equity major Apollo Global Management.

The BOI announcement comes after Cushman & Wakefield reported last month that Thailand had the ninth-biggest data centre project pipeline in Asia Pacific at 191MW, with $1.46 billion in capital required to carry out the workload. The consultancy also deemed Thailand one of the region’s fastest-growing data centre markets alongside Indonesia and Malaysia.

“Ensuring that the digital infrastructure, including data centres, keeps in line with the demand of foreign investors and local entrepreneurs is essential to Thailand’s competitiveness in the age of the digital economy,” said BOI secretary general Narit Therdsteerasukdi.

Kingdom’s New Wave

The Beijing Haoyang data centre, which had not been publicly announced, will be located at WHA Eastern Seaboard Industrial Estate 4 in Rayong province, the BOI said. Led by 21Vianet veteran Lai Ningning, Beijing Haoyang has a China portfolio of five projects with a collective capacity of 360MW, according to the company’s website.

The Chinese platform previously set up joint ventures with an Apollo-managed fund to develop a 20,000-rack data centre in the Hebei provincial city of Langfang and a 12,000-rack campus in Hebei’s Baoding.

The other greenlit Thailand projects include Empyrion Digital’s edge co-location data centre in Bangkok, dubbed TH1, a THB 4.7 billion facility with an IT load of 12MW. Singapore-based Empyrion, backed by infrastructure fund manager Seraya Partners, said last year that the project was expected to be completed by 2027.

The BOI also approved a THB 13.5 billion project of GSA, a tie-up of Singapore’s Singtel and Thai firms Gulf Energy and AIS, with plans calling for 35MW of capacity at the facility in Chonburi province.

Growing Hotspot

Global tech titans have turned their attention to Thailand’s burgeoning data centre market in recent months, with Google unveiling a $1 billion digital infrastructure investment plan for the kingdom in September and TikTok maker ByteDance winning a BOI nod for $3.8 billion in projects in January.

Others circling the market include US data centre giant Equinix, which announced a plan in October to invest $500 million in Thailand’s digital infrastructure over the next decade. The same month, Bloomberg reported that Dubai-based Edgnex would spend $1 billion on three or four data centre projects in the country through a joint venture with local operator Proen Corp.

News of the multibillion-dollar proposals followed Microsoft’s May declaration of “significant commitments” to new cloud and AI infrastructure in Thailand.