Amazon plans $5-billion investment to boost cloud ecosystem in Thailand

Conor McNamara, AWS managing director for ASEAN, stated at a press conference on Tuesday that the investment would cover all aspects of the cloud ecosystem, from local infrastructure to reskilling and upskilling people.

AWS is currently building a data centre in Thailand called Region, according to McNamara. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will have three availability zones, joining the existing 87 availability zones spread across 27 geographic regions.

Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 additional availability zones across eight additional AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand.

"The upcoming AWS Region in Thailand will allow developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, to run their applications and serve end users from AWS data centres in Thailand, ensuring that customers who want to keep their data in Thailand can do so," McNamara pointed out.

AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will enable organisations to build with AWS technologies such as AI and machine learning, data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), he said.

"With these new tools, AWS is empowering governments to better engage citizens, enterprises to innovate for their next stage of growth, and entrepreneurs to build businesses and compete on a global scale," McNamara noted.

Eric Conrad, AWS' regional managing director for the public sector in ASEAN, explained that now is the time to invest in Thailand's cloud industry. It is due to the government's supportive policy and businesses' strong desire to transition to digital after witnessing cloud's effectiveness during the pandemic.

"We want to be the first comprehensive cloud service provider in this country and a reliable long-term partner for Thai agencies and entrepreneurs as well as multinational companies interested in conducting business in Thailand and the Asean region," Conrad said.

 "Thailand's demand is growing exponentially, and AWS saw this potential."

AWS intends to introduce AWS Local Zone in Bangkok in addition to Region. This type of AWS infrastructure deployment enables customers to deliver applications that need single-digit millisecond latency to end-users by moving compute, storage, databases, and other select services closer to major population centres, industries, and IT hubs.

Meanwhile, AWS continues to invest in Thailand's developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders through programmes such as AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate. These AWS education programmes prepare students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences for careers in the cloud.

McNamara stated that the training course is part of AWA's goal of creating 30 million skilled workers worldwide. AWS has already trained 700,000 people in the Asean region.

He also promised to expand its AWS Partner Network, which already includes over 100,000 independent software vendors and systems integrators worldwide. This collaboration will assist AWS clients in serving their customers or finding the best solution for small and medium-sized businesses.

Thai Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Supattanapong Punmeechow lauded the AWS investment plan.

He described it as a significant milestone that would bring advanced cloud computing services to more organisations and assist the government in achieving the Thailand 4.0 ambition of creating a digitised, value-based economy.

Narit Therdsteerasukdi, secretary-general of Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI), said that the BOI is one of AWS’ partners to facilitate the company’s investment in Thailand. He is confident that this latest initiative will help boost Thailand's global competitiveness while also driving innovation and economic productivity across all industries.

AWS now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, IoT, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 87 availability zones within 27 geographic regions.