Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been serving customers in Thailand since 2006. In 2015, AWS established a local presence by opening an office in Bangkok, enabling the company to drive innovation and provide transformative cloud capabilities to organizations across Thai industries. Today, AWS reaffirmed its commitment, announcing that its new AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will be live by early 2025. This investment of more than 190 billion baht (US$5 billion) in Thailand by 2037 will provide developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations, with greater choice when running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in Thailand.
The new AWS Region in Thailand will add to the existing AWS infrastructure in the country, including 10 Amazon CloudFront edge locations, AWS Outposts, and AWS Local Zones. The new AWS Region, the fourth Region launched in ASEAN after Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia - due to go live in 2024 - will also enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Thailand, help customers achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.
Thailand’s growing digital economy is propelling the country forward as a regional powerhouse for innovation under the “Ignite Thailand” ambition. The convergence of strategic investments, a clear vision for the nation’s digital future, and technological prowess have unleashed a transformative energy that is reshaping industries, empowering businesses, and elevating the nation on the global stage.
Aligned with the government’s “Ignite Thailand” plan, the country’s cloud-first ambition aiming to build a thriving economy driven by innovation, creativity, and technology, the new AWS Region in Thailand will play a pivotal role in advancing the country’s digitization ambitions and meeting the high demand for cloud services, while supporting innovation in Thailand and across Southeast Asia. This new infrastructure will nurture a vibrant community where startups, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprises, and public sector organizations can collaborate, experiment, and thrive with access to the latest technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), and more.
“We welcome AWS’s $5 billion investment in the new AWS Thailand Region, which will enable a significant step forward in Thailand’s digital transformation journey. This move strengthens our national infrastructure and empowers the growth of thousands of Thai businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups. This investment aligns with our vision for the Cloud First initiative, aiming to position Thailand as a central hub for the digital economy in Southeast Asia,” said Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin. “The AWS Thailand Region will support economic opportunities, enhance our workforce’s digital skills, and drive innovation. We are committed to collaborating with AWS to maximize the benefits of this development for every Thai citizen, marking a cornerstone in our efforts to turn Thailand into a leading digital economy, providing a solid infrastructure for growth and competitiveness on the global stage,” he added.
Fueling digital transformation for local customers and AWS Partners
In Thailand, AWS’s team is made up of diverse Amazonians from across disciplines and job functions, including sales, solutions architects, training and certification, and business development. This team is dedicated to supporting organizations of all sizes to build on AWS to fuel their digital transformation. Local Thai customers and partners include 2C2P,Accenture, aCommerce, Amity, Ascend Money, AXONS, Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CPF), DailiTech, G-Able, Kiatnakin Financial Services Group, National Telecom, MONIX, NocNoc, PTT, SiS Distribution, and Toyota.
“Customers in Thailand, such as Bangkok Airways, CP All, PTT Global Chemical, and Siam Commercial Bank, are already harnessing the most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud technology through AWS to spark innovation, enhance productivity, and propel economic advancement in Thailand and beyond,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Country Manager of AWS Thailand. “With the launch of our AWS Thailand Region by early 2025, we are excited to further support Thailand’s ambition to be a digital technology leader in the region, aiming to foster a prosperous future for all our customers and partners.”
The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) has been Thailand’s primary securities trading venue since 1975, with its online trading platform supporting over 3.6 million users. “AWS provides us with a robust, highly scalable, and low latency cloud infrastructure for our online trading platform that can meet stringent security and compliance requirements,” said Thirapun Sanpakit, senior executive vice president and head of the IT division at SET. “With an increase in digital investors, it is vital for SET to adapt quickly to new market demands and offer services that cater to the appetite of this growing generation. Using AWS for SET’s online trading platforms helps us easily scale to accommodate 500,000 concurrent users, while maintaining maximum operational efficiency. With the new AWS Region opening in Thailand by early 2025, we can look forward to expanding our low latency market data offerings to further enhance the trading experience of our investors."
Bank of Ayudhya Public Company Limited (Krungsri), one of Thailand's top five banks, is advancing its digital transformation by leveraging AWS to address specific challenges such as enhancing customer experience, improving financial accessibility, and optimizing operational efficiency. The bank utilizes AWS technologies, including data analytics, ML, and AI, to innovate and streamline processes. This strategic integration enhances collaboration across the group's entities—Bank of Ayudhya, Ayudhya Capital Services, and Krungsri Auto—enabling them to deliver more personalized and efficient services. “As our strategic cloud provider, AWS plays a critical role in driving the Krungsri Cloud Program. With a local Thailand Region, this will expand Krungsri and AWS partnership tremendously and will significantly expand the possibilities” said Pochara Vanaratseath, Head of IT, Bank of Ayudhaya Plc.
Established in 2016, Kasikorn Business-Technology Group (KBTG) is the technology arm of Kasikorn Bank (KBank), one of Thailand’s leading commercial banks. KBTG is dedicated to supporting KBank and K-Group on their digital transformation and day-to-day business technology needs, overseeing more than 400 applications that make financial services accessible, convenient and inclusive to customers across Asia Pacific. “Building on AWS has been a game-changing strategy for us, enabling us to establish our leadership in the fintech industry,” said Tawan Jithavech, Chief Technology Officer at KBTG. “We chose AWS because of its broad spectrum of services, deep expertise in cloud solutions, and the agility with which they can help us scale our operations. AWS’s utility model offers the flexibility our financial operations require, scaling with demand to keep us cost-efficient. With the new AWS Region in Thailand, we look forward to enhancing our network response times, synchronizing data more effectively, securing our infrastructure, and consistently delivering superior financial services to our customers quickly and safely.”
PTG Energy PCL is a large Thailand-based energy company with a strong focus on petroleum distribution and retail services. “Currently, our core applications are running on AWS, where we continuously receive reliable services and support. With future plans to upgrade our POS system for retail stores and gas stations all over the country, we have full confidence in hosting the new POS system fully on AWS; especially with the upcoming launch of the AWS Thailand Region, which will provide us with local latency benefits crucial to our store operations with high levels of transactions,” said Songpon Busparoek, Chief Information Officer at PTG Energy PCL.
PTT Global Chemical (GC) is Thailand’s largest integrated petrochemical and refining business, and a leading corporation in Asia Pacific. Aligning with global petrochemical and biochemical megatrends, GC is the world’s number one bioplastics producer. By prioritizing use cases and projects that leverage efficiencies and improve the company’s bottom line, GC started implementing a data platform on AWS led by ProServe, and later adopted ML Operations to improve efficiency in multiple use cases for production plants. Recently, GC has integrated their AskMeGC, an enterprise-grade generative AI system, with Amazon Bedrock and is now leveraging Claude 3 on AWS. “The launch of AWS Region in Thailand makes it possible for us to leverage historical data to innovate, explore new use cases and improve productivity using generative AI with Amazon Bedrock,” said Chatsuda Kanjanarat , Senior Vice President, Transformation Excellence at GC.
Siam Cement Group (SCG), a leading Thai business conglomerate with three core businesses that include cement building materials, chemicals, and packaging selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to better serve customers, and drive efficiencies for growth. By running its SAP workloads on AWS, SCG is combining real-time inventory and production data across operations in various locations to develop new services that improve the customer experience by enabling easy and secure access to services, while reducing information technology (IT) costs by 30%. “This launch of the new AWS Region in Thailand will provide even greater reliability, security, and efficiency allowing us to push the boundaries of industrial data with generative AI and improve productivity and business operations. We’re excited to explore new generative AI capabilities on AWS that will help to create new customer experiences and develop innovative products, services, and solutions that meet the diverse needs of our customers,” said Piyapon Valaikanok, Director of Corporate IT at SCG.
An increase in generative AI interest in Thailand
Generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content and ideas, will have a profoundly positive impact on industries and society, and we are now seeing the level of interest among the general public notably increasing. The new AWS Thailand Region reflects AWS’s long-term commitment to customers so they can take advantage of advanced technologies like AI and ML.
Bangkok Biz News by Nation Group (Thailand) PLC is building on AWS to leverage generative AI in carrying out tasks such as text summarization, as well as content and ads personalization for their online newspaper. Bangkok Biz News is one of Thailand’s largest online business news publications and is part of The Nation Group. Through AWS, they are able to create easily consumable, personalized content for readers while driving efficiencies across media teams. Bangkok Biz News plans to leverage the Claude2 foundation model on Amazon Bedrock, using news content to fine tune it and develop summaries of articles to make it quicker and easier for readers to digest content on the go. Generative AI will also enable the improvement of customer experience by allowing readers to customize the news they want to receive.
Thai startup Botnoi Voice is another example of the growing usage of generative AI in Thailand. Botnoi Voice built a text-to-speech AI bot, Botnoi Voice, that creates new synthesized voices in the Thai language with remarkable naturalness and clarity. The culturally aware large language model leverages AWS compute services for generating natural speech synthesis audios and saving to files. Brands are benefitting from the ease and accessibility of Botnoi Voice’s services to improve customer engagement across industries, including financial services, education and media, and enable brands to offer engaging and intuitive experiences.
Growing need for local cloud knowledge and digital skills
Thailand is facing a looming AI skills gap in the country, with 64% of Thailand employers say they struggle to find the AI talent they need. This is according to “Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Asia-Pacific Workforce for Jobs of the Future,” the latest AI digital skills research by Access Partnership and AWS, which highlights the importance of AI skills for both Thailand workers and employers.
AWS is committed to upskilling Thai citizens to bridge the skills gap, and has trained more than 50,000 individuals in Thailand with cloud skills since 2017, and will train 100,000 individuals by 2026. This has been done through collaborations with organizations such as Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES), Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI), and leading companies like CPF and Central Group, as well as various AWS training and certification programs.
In November 2023, Amazon launched the “AI Ready” initiative that complements AWS’s commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million individuals globally by 2025. Through ‘AI Ready,’ we now offer a suite of free AI and generative AI training courses, aligned to both technical and non-technical roles, so that anyone can build AI skills. AWS Academy offers higher education institutions access to a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs and is currently available to students at 26 Thai institutions across Thailand, including Chulalongkorn University, Thammasat University, and Chiang Mai University. AWS has launched various AWS Training and Certification programs in Thailand to equip individuals with the right skills to thrive in a digital world such as AWS Skill Builder, a digital learning experience with over 600 free on-demand cloud skills courses including 62 in local Thai language, including new online learning center that makes it easy to build AWS Cloud Skills and self-paced digital training on demand when and where it's convenient.
