From Nikkei Asia, March 17:
Chinese hyperscaler gets green light for $2.2 billion investment
Chinese real estate company Beijing Haoyang will build its first data center outside China in Thailand, a 300-megawatt facility worth 72.7 billion baht ($2.2 billion) that would have the largest announced capacity in the Southeast Asian country.
Thailand's Board of Investment approved the project on Monday. It also greenlit two smaller data centers -- a 12-MW project to be built by Singapore's Empyrion Digital, and a 35-MW facility by GSA Data Center, a joint venture between Thailand's Gulf Energy and Advanced Info Services, and Singtel, the Singaporean telco. These are worth 4.7 billion baht and 13.5 billion baht respectively.
Beijing Haoyang, which has ventured into data centers in recent years, has built a total capacity of 360 MW in mainland China and the Greater Bay Area spanning Hong Kong and Macao, according to its website. Its investment pledge comes as Thai conglomerates and foreign companies -- including American hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft and AWS -- vie to serve local and regional demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence centers.
Ongoing investments in Southeast Asian data centers appear to dispel the sentiment that China's low-cost AI startup DeepSeek in January disrupted the sector's high-spending business model.
Chinese social media giant TikTok announced in January it will invest 126 billion baht to build data center infrastructure across three Thai provinces, including Bangkok. Google last year disclosed plans to invest $1 billion in a Thai data center, while Microsoft has committed $1.7 billion to Malaysia and an undisclosed amount to Thailand....
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