TikTok Pte. Ltd, the Singaporean unit of China's ByteDance, is set to invest $3.8 billion in "data hosting services" in Thailand.
The Thai Board of Investment announced that it had approved TikTok's Thai digital infrastructure project on January 29, at the same time approving a 3.25 billion baht ($96.4m) project by Siam AI Corporation for AI cloud services.
“TikTok’s and Siam AI’s investments mark a significant step in enhancing Thailand’s digital and AI infrastructure and supporting the national goal of becoming a digital innovation hub in Southeast Asia,” said Narit Therdsteerasukdi, secretary-general of the Board of Investment.
TikTok will be providing data hosting services to "support the activities of affiliated companies," with operations slated to begin in 2026.
It has not been specified if the data hosting service will be offered from TikTok-developed and owned data centers, or if the company intends to lease out space in other data centers for the service. However, in October 2024, reports emerged that TikTok's parent company ByteDance was looking at opening a Thailand data center to support cloud and AI services.
DCD has reached out to TikTok for more information about its planned Thai investment.
In June of last year the company revealed it was opening an AI hub in Malaysia at a cost of RM10 billion ($2.13bn) at Bridge Data Centres' (BDC) MY06 hyperscale facility, and in July 2024 was also reportedly considering whether to set up a data center in Australia to support workloads across the Asia Pacific region. ByteDance's Chinese operations also use Bridge Data Centres facilities (known as ChinData locally).
In the US, where TikTok's future remains uncertain, the company is hosting its infrastructure in data centers managed by Oracle. In Europe, TikTok's operations are split between Green Mountain in Norway, and an Irish data center.
Thailand is proving to be an increasingly popular location for the hyperscalers.
In September 2024, Google said it would invest $1 billion in data centers in capital city Bangkok and the nearby coastal province of Chonburi, creating 14,000 jobs in the process.
As part of the project, Google will work with Gulf Edge to create a sovereign cloud offering in Thailand.
AWS launched a cloud region in Thailand earlier this month as part of a plan to invest $5 billion by 2037, while Microsoft also plans to build a data center region in the country.
Bridge Data Centres also operates a number of data centers in the country, coming to the market via acquisition.
