Syed Imran Haider 
On Monday, Google announced that it is making an investment in Thailand worth $1 billion. This is around 36 billion Thai baht.
The funds would be used for building a new data center and expanding the cloud infrastructure in the country.
The Expansion
This move is another step forward in Google’s expansion in the continent. The search engine giant has focused on artificial intelligence for its international push.
It comes at a time when the company is battling intense competition from firms, such as OpenAI and Microsoft.
Google posted on its Thailand blog on Monday to make the announcement about the investment. It said that this would be its first data center in the country.
In this modern digital economy, the importance of data centers has become quite evident. It is because they have fueled the rise of cloud computing technology.
Thanks to this technology, people can use the internet to access storage, compute and analytics services. According to Google, its data center will be located in Thailand’s eastern province called Chonburi.
In the blog post it published, the Thailand country lead, Jackie Wang, spoke about the expectations associated with the data center.
The Purpose
He said that the new facility would be helpful in supporting the increasing demand for Google’s AI innovations and Cloud.
Likewise, it would also support popular services of the company, such as Google Maps, Google Search and Google Workspace.
Google is not just making the investment of $1 billion to develop infrastructure in Thailand, but it also wants to open up new opportunities for educators, businesses and all Thais.
According to Wang, artificial intelligence technology is revolutionizing a number of industries. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to educate Thais as well as upskill them to use this technology.
The digital economy in Thailand is considered Southeast Asia’s second-largest one.
In a report published in 2023, Bain & Company, Temasek and Google said that Thailand’s economy will reach a valuation of $50 billion by 2025.
Google’s Situation
Google has made AI its focus where its investment in the region is concerned. It is facing significant pressure from rival tech giants in the field of cloud computing as well as AI.
As far as search engine technology is concerned, Google remains the global leader in this area without a doubt.
However, the rise of generative AI tools, with Open AI’s ChatGPT being the most prominent, have proven to be a threat to the company.
It is interesting to note that Google actually helped pioneer this technology through the early research it conducted on transformer models.
Many of the most popular generative AI tools being used today have used these models. But, these generative AI products have now become a threat to Google itself.
Not only does it include ChatGPT, but also Perplexity, which is a search engine powered by AI. People are now using these to find information about various things.
Last week, Google filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft with the European Commission. It accused the latter of undermining competition by abusing its dominant position in the cloud space.
