Sourced records of Chinese AI deployments across the Global South and the Middle East

Huawei Cloud operates data centres in Thailand and cooperates with the public sector: it announced in November 2020 the construction of a third Thailand data centre for approximately THB 700 million (approximately USD 23 million), with launch planned for 2021, and signed an MoU with Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES) in December 2023; work with the Thai Meteorological Department covers weather-forecasting models.

Tencent Cloud opened its SECOND internet data centre in Thailand in Bangkok in June 2021 (announced alongside Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo), a Tier-3 facility with GPU support offering AI, IoT, facial recognition, OCR and Live Video Broadcasting (LVB); as of January 2023 it operated two high-performance data centres in Thailand serving local enterprises and government. Its Thai market entry predates this: Tencent Cloud has been distributed and co-delivered in Thailand by True IDC (True Corporation's data-centre arm) since at least April 2019, and True IDC's current Tencent Cloud service page markets in-country data residency (PDPA), facial recognition and digital identity verification, intelligent virtual humans, enterprise LLM knowledge management, AI image/video generation, and CDN across 2,800+ global nodes, with Thai-baht billing and Thai engineer support.

Alibaba Cloud launched Thailand's first local data centre on 12 May 2022, obtaining ISO27001/ISO20000 certification and complying with Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT)'s financial regulatory guidelines; in early 2025 it launched a second data centre, bringing a richer generative AI product portfolio and industry-specific solutions to address local GenAI demand, and building a local ecosystem together with more than 40 partners, including National Telecom and True IDC, through the Partner Alliance 100 partner programme.

ByteDance/TikTok's data-centre investment in Thailand, promoted through the Thailand Board of Investment. Helena Lersch, TikTok's Global Vice President of Public Policy, disclosed a five-year, USD 8.8 billion data-centre investment plan for Thailand in Bangkok on 28 February 2025 (Reuters); it is unclear whether this includes an earlier USD 3.76 billion project. The expansion entity is TikTok System (Thailand) Co., Ltd.