Nvidia Corp is set to unveil investment plans for Thailand, joining Alphabet Inc and Microsoft Corp, as Southeast Asia becomes a hot spot for building artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and manufacturing the components that power them.
The US chip designing firm would announce investments during chief executive officer Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) trip to Bangkok in December, Thai Minister of Commerce Pichai Naripthaphan said on Monday.
He declined to give details on the investment or how much the company would bring into Thailand.
Photo: AP
The investment by Nvidia could lead to more funding “with related clusters following suit,” Pichai said.
Clinching Nvidia as an investor in Thailand would be a shot in the arm for Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy that has been vying with its neighbors to attract investments from tech giants. Thailand has bagged multibillion dollar investments over the past few years from Amazon.com Inc, Google and Microsoft to build data centers and other cloud infrastructure.
A spokesperson for Nvidia did not reply to an e-mailed request for comment.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has pledged investments in building AI infrastructure in Indonesia and Malaysia, and is exploring opportunities in Vietnam.
Nvidia’s chips are manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and its AI servers are built mostly by Taiwanese assemblers.
A longtime manufacturing powerhouse for vehicles and electronics, Thailand is playing catch-up with Malaysia and Singapore. It wants to bolster growth from an average of less than 2 percent under a decade of military-backed rule.
Interest from Nvidia, other tech companies, and those in the supply chain should boost investment applications back to levels before a 2014 coup and help Thailand regain “lost opportunities” in that decade, Pichai said.
“The outlook for the Thai economy is bright and this is only the beginning,” said the veteran politician, who was appointed to the job last month in the administration of the Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
There is already a surge in foreign investment pledges in Thailand this year, especially into the data centers and printed circuit board manufacturing. Official data showed investment pledges jumped 42 percent to 722.5 billion baht (US$21.6 billion) in the first nine months of this year from a year ago.
Pichai said new investment proposals, including from domestic companies, might reach as much as 1 trillion baht this year.
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