Thailand Approves Chinese Operator’s $730M Data Centre Project

The government of Thailand on Friday approved a Chinese operator’s plan to invest THB 23.7 billion ($730 million) to build a 203-megawatt data centre in the industrial heartland east of Bangkok.

Stratus Technology, described as an affiliate of China’s ZData Technologies, will develop the facility at CPGC Industrial Estate in Rayong province, Thailand’s Board of Investment said in a release. ZData is a digital infrastructure brand of Beijing-based CNISP Group, which has received funding from venture firms HongShan Capital, an offshoot of Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, and Eastern Bell Capital, co-founded by GLP boss Ming Z Mei.

Approval of the big-ticket development comes after the BOI in March gave the go-ahead to three data centre projects with a combined IT load capacity of 347MW and a total investment of $2.7 billion.

“The momentum of the demand for digital services should ensure that the data centre investments remain a highlight in terms of the value of applications this year,” said BOI secretary general Narit Therdsteerasukdi.

Regional Ambitions

Founded in 2014, ZData has more than 30 data centres in operation or under construction in key Chinese cities representing 2 gigawatts of total IT load, according to the company website.

The platform is extending beyond China, having acquired a data centre site in the Malaysian hotspot of Johor from local builder Tropicana late last year. Bloomberg reported in November that ZData was weighing a Hong Kong IPO that could value the company at over $5 billion.

At the 1,213 acre (491 hectare) CPGC Industrial Estate — run by a unit of the Charoen Pokphand Group controlled by the Chearavanont family, Thailand’s richest clan — ZData plans to build a data centre to Tier III standards, carrying an expectation of less than 1.6 hours of annual downtime.

The development will add to the kingdom’s digital infrastructure workbook after Cushman & Wakefield reported in February that Thailand had the ninth-biggest data centre project pipeline in Asia Pacific at 191MW, requiring $1.46 billion in capital. The consultancy also deemed Thailand one of APAC’s fastest-growing data centre markets alongside Indonesia and Malaysia.

Foreign Interest

Among the projects approved by the BOI in March was a 300MW facility developed by Beijing Haoyang Cloud Data Technology, a mainland China platform whose investors include US private equity major Apollo Global Management.

Global tech titans have also turned their attention to Thailand, 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.

Earlier this month, Singapore-based Digital Edge announced a JV with local firm B.Grimm Power to build a 100MW data centre campus in Thailand’s east.