Amazon invests $5 billion in Thailand

Amazon has announced that it will invest five billion US dollars in Thailand. The plan is to build data centers for its own cloud infrastructure. Other large companies had also previously invested larger sums in Thailand.

Expansion of cloud network

Amazon has big plans regarding its cloud infrastructure. Through Amazon Cloudfront, it will provide data, videos, applications and APIs that users can access. Amazon is one of the global market leaders in this field. Now the infrastructure behind it is to be expanded in order to further increase the performance of the systems. The new data centers planned for the Asia/Pacific region are to be located largely in Thailand. Amazon has already opened ten sites in Bangkok since 2020; now it is expected to add numerous more in the country. Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Supattanapong Punmeechaow sees this as a big step for Thailand: “AWS’ plan to build a data center in Thailand represents a weighty milestone that will help make advanced cloud computing offerings accessible to more organizations and help us realize our Thailand 4.0 goal of a digitized, value-based economy.”

Cloud centers also planned in other countries

Meanwhile, the construction of corresponding cloud centers is also planned in other regions. For example, Amazon recently opened its first data center in the United Arab Emirates. Locations in Mexico, Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland are also planned.

But it is not only Amazon that is currently expanding its cloud infrastructure. Google is also working on its cloud service. The Amazon competitor announced in August that it is building more data centers in Thailand, Malaysia and New Zealand. Alibaba, the largest Chinese cloud company, and Microsoft are also focusing on the Asia-Pacific market. Alibaba has a presence there outside of China, with locations in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Japan and South Korea. Microsoft operates data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, with plans to build additional sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Taiwan.

While some cloud offerings, such as Google’s cloud gaming– or Amazon’s cloud storage service, have failed to catch on, cloud computing is on the rise overall, especially in the enterprise space.