Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI) is instrumental in shaping the country’s current data center boom, the Thailand Cloud & Datacenter Convention – Global heard yesterday, as reported by Paul Mah, Executive Editor of w.media. “The Thailand data centre industry is booming, and credit must go to the influential BOI for opening the way,” Mah said in his Linkedin post yesterday. Mah also quoted lawyer Pattaraphan Paiboon of Baker & McKenzie who credited the BOI as having one of the biggest impacts on the growth of the data centre industry in Thailand.
Quoting Tanita Sirisup, Deputy Secretary-General of BOI, who was also one of the speakers at the conference, Mah said the agency is responsible for promoting and facilitating investments in Thailand. It creates an environment for innovation and investments, integrates help and support of relevant agencies, and ensures a conducive digital ecosystem in Thailand.
Crucially, the agency is empowered to offer substantial incentives to achieve its mission. This includes a tax holiday of up to 13 years, permission for 100 per cent foreign ownership and permission to own land for BOI-approved projects. These three incentives make up powerful factors to induce foreign direct investments into the country.
Tanita also shared little-known facts about the industry, for instance, there were 57 data centre applications since 2022, adding to a combined value of US$ 25 billion. Most FDIs in 2025 came from data centres, though the exact amount was not disclosed. The agency has projected a CAGR of 6.6 per cent (2025 – 2030) for data center growth with almost a quarter of that for the public cloud. In addition, Thailand is also strong in interconnectivity, with 13 cable landings and an additional two expected to be completed by 2027.
Mah concluded that the current data centre growth in Thailand today “isn’t something that happened by chance”. It had been years in the making.
He observed that for its continued success, there should be more industry collaboration and partnerships; continued support and dialogue with regulators; and connectivity and infrastructure planning.
Record FDIs
A check with the BOI’s website saw it announcing a record 94 per cent increase year-on-year in investments from January – September 2025 to a combined 1.37 trillion baht (US$ 42.2 billion), the highest level on record since the BOI was established 60 years ago. The increase was due mainly to a sharp increase in mostly large FDI projects in the digital sector, and the manufacturing of smart electronics components and devices.
A total of 119 projects were filed under the digital sector, mostly data centers, for a combined investment value of 612.8 billion baht, while applications for projects in electricity generation from renewable sources amounted to a combined value of 74.2 billion baht.
According to a BOI statement, Singapore was the top source of FDI applications in value with 359.8 billion baht, followed by Hong Kong with 237.3 billion baht, China with 142.9 billion baht, the United Kingdom with 100.3 billion baht, and Japan with 73.8 billion baht.
It added that applications for large investments in data center businesses so far this year included a 72.7 billion baht pledge by Beijing Haoyang Cloud Data Technology’s Hong Kong unit, a 52.6 billion baht pledge by U.K.-based Zenith Data Center and Cloud Services, and a 38 billion baht pledge by Singapore-based Galaxy Peak Data Center.