Sustainability has taken top priority among businesses in Thailand and the broader Southeast Asian region.
Thailand’s startups, large corporations, and small to medium-sized enterprises are in the midst of a cloud transformation journey towards digitalization, according to Vatsun Thirapatarapong, country manager of AWS Thailand, as reported in the Bangkok Post.
A potential avenue for leveraging the cloud to support organizations in reaching their sustainability objectives involves transitioning from on-premise data centers to cloud-based data centers.
The Southeast Asia Green Economy 2023 Report underscores the pivotal role Southeast Asia plays in the global climate landscape. Regional leaders are striving to balance various pressures, including economic expansion, increasing primary energy demands and climate action at scale. While attention and commitments are increasing across the region, more concerted efforts are reportedly needed to ensure the region attains its target of reducing emissions by approximately 33% by 2030.
Further reflecting its commitment to sustainability, the Thai government has set an ambitious objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030.
In alignment with these goals, the data center sector in Thailand is also actively engaged in efforts to enhance sustainability practices. In May, Etix Everywhere, a Thailand-based data center operator, announced plans to double its ETIX Bangkok #1 data center capacity, after its official launch one year ago, to comply with the new international customer demand while conforming with the requirements in terms of design and environmental sustainability.
The new phase of the development will add another 400 racks and 1.5 MW of capacity to the data center and will be live by Q4 this year. The design of the data center uses ETIX standard technical design to reduce its carbon footprint. With a PUE of 1.3 and a solar farm of 830 kWp installed on the roof to generate its own electricity, the CO2 emissions of the data center have been reduced by 35%.
In January, Supernap also unveiled its very first solar project to power its data center. The solar farm was constructed near to Supernap’s data center facilities, which is situated in the Economic Eastern Corridor (EEC), beyond the floodplain of Bangkok and next to the international network landing station with connections to all of Thailand.