Huawei Technologies Thailand has re-announced its plan to invest in a 700-million-baht ($22.6 million) data centre in Thailand this year, noted an article on Bangkok Post.

This will be the third data centre investment of Huawei in the country, following the previous ones in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) in 2018 and in Bangkok in 2019.

Abel Deng, chief executive of Huawei Technologies Thailand, emphasised that the move is to support the shift toward Thailand’s digital economy, which is accelerated by the pandemic.

Though the digital economy currently contributes less than 20 per cent to Thailand’s GDP, Artificial Intelligence and cloud computing adoptions in Thailand expect to reach 80 to 85 per cent of the total businesses by 2025. 5G adoption is also set to hit 25 per cent in the next few years. The total effect is to increase the digital economy’s contribution to 30 per cent of the GDP by 2030, the statement noted.

“As a trusted ICT partner for the country, Huawei is continuing investment to help Thailand move towards Thailand 4.0 and become a digital hub in the region,” said Deng.

He added that SMEs would be among the largest beneficiaries as these technologies help them ensure business agility and cost reductions. Startups, on the other hand, will serve as key technology enablers and a driver for the digital economy.

Weighting the importance of this approach, Huawei has rolled out various strategic activities in the country recently, such as running the “Cloud Spark Programme” to provide free cloud usage credits for startups, hosting the 5G innovation competition to urge industries to leverage new application and use cases, launching 5G Ecosystem Innovation Centre (5G EIC) in collaboration with Digital Economy Promotion Agency (Depa), and expanding the partnership this year to set up an “alliance” to build a 5G ecosystem.

“We cannot compete on low labour costs anymore as automation is prevalent in modern factories,” Depa president Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin said in a statement on announcing its collaboration with Huawei.

Two weeks earlier, the Thai Prime Minister granted a special award to Huawei Technologies Thailand as the Digital International Corporation Of The Year. After 21 years of operations within the country, Huawei marked its achievement as the only foreign company to receive this honour in 2021.

Huawei has expanded its presence in ASEAN in the past few years in an effort to promote digital transformation in the region. In February, an agency under Malaysia’s Ministry of Communications and Multimedia announced the collaboration with Huawei and local telco Celcom Axiata Berhad to build Southeast Asia’s first 5G cybersecurity test lab. Indonesia government also signed the first deal of its kind with Huawei to develop 5G in the country last December.