Google Cloud and Gulf Edge are bound to deliver innovative AI-ready sovereign cloud services in Thailand in compliance with the country’s stringent data residency, security, and privacy requirements.
Gulf Edge, a fully-owned subsidiary of Gulf Energy Development Public Company Limited, has partnered with Google Asia Pacific to operate as a provider of Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) services for organizations in Thailand.
This artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled sovereign cloud solution allows companies to build, deploy, and scale modern industry and public sector applications on-premises with AI-ready infrastructure. In Thailand, the offering mainly targets organizations operating in critical sectors involving sensitive data, such as healthcare, public safety, energy, and utility providers.
Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) enables businesses and public entities to innovate and scale faster with enterprise-ready generative AI. One of GDC’s benefits is that it operates within a customer’s chosen environment without connectivity to a Google Cloud region or the public internet. Therefore, Thai critical sectors would be able to accelerate their digital transformations with best-in-class AI and analytics capabilities without compromising their data, operational, and software sovereignty.
Besides empowering local organizations, this partnership presents opportunities for Gulf Edge to expand its business. In particular, the company can deliver additional services within the Google Cloud ecosystem. Moreover, Gulf Edge mentioned potential future ventures into AI and cybersecurity solutions in the dedicated press release.
The collaboration has mutual benefits. Gulf is well-established in the electricity generation and renewable energy business, and its facilities can support the clean energy demands of data centre businesses. Data centres are critical to ensure the operation of cloud services. Therefore, AWS, Microsoft, and Google committed to investing $8.5 billion in developing data centre infrastructure in Thailand last year.
Google was the first US cloud provider to announce a region in Thailand to provide access to advanced cloud solutions for companies and organizations in the public and private sectors of the country. It also has projects in development in New Zealand and Malaysia.
The data centre in Malaysia is worth about $2 billion of Google’s investment. Malaysia’s cloud region will be the latest addition to Google’s network of 40 regions and 121 zones worldwide.
