Thailand pauses all datacenter builds and approvals

ASIA IN BRIEF Thailand’s National Economic and Social Development Council last week decided to pause all datacenter builds in the country, while it works out appropriate regulations. The Council announced the pause last Friday in a communiqué issued after a meeting of its Datacenter Business Policy Committee, at which Thailand’s Prime Minister and Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said datacenters are an important part of the nation’s economy – but admitted his government doesn’t have good data about how many of the facilities currently operate, or the pipeline for new builds. That’s quite an admission as community disquiet with datacenter development has become an issue in Thailand. The Council’s development approval pause gives operators and investors a week to submit info about their operations, to help the government expedite development of a unified regulatory framework for datacenters. Bangkok also wants to develop a plan to determine how many datacenters Thailand needs, and the format of those facilities. The Council’s starting point is to consider all datacenters using more than 2 MW of electricity as industrial businesses, consider the introduction of “resource utilization fees” so that indirect costs that flow from datacenter builds don’t increase costs for the public, and establishment of an assessment process for future builds to ensure that new datacenters “create the most benefit for Thailand.” The government hopes that the result is a datacenter ecosystem that will “create tangible and sustainable added value for the Thai economy.” Fujitsu yet not budgeting Horizon compensation The chief financial officer of Japanese tech giant Fujitsu last week told Japan’s Nikkei that the company hasn’t yet budgeted to pay compensation for the disastrous Horizon project at the British Post Office. “We are waiting for the results of the statutory inquiry,” said Takeshi Isobe. “We haven't factored compensation payouts into our earnings forecast for the year ending March 2027, and the amounts and timing of any spending on that have yet to be determined.” In the interview with Nikkei, Isobe also said Fujitsu “won't be mass-producing commodity-grade products.” That remark suggests Fujitsu will likely continue its withdrawal from PC and server markets around the world. NEC may have quit quantum Another Nikkei report from last week claims NEC has decided not to commercialize a quantum computer it developed in-house. The report says NEC thinks getting the machine to market will take so long that return on investment will likely prove elusive. South Korea developing its own cybersecurity model Naver, a South Korean tech giant, last week announced that it will lead an effort to build a foundation AI model focused on security. South Korea’s Ministry of Science and IT wants the model to give the country sovereign bug-finding capacity and sought local companies to build it. Naver got the gig and said it plans to throw 4,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs at the project, which will rework its existing HyperClova X and ExaOne models into a pair of 700-billion parameter models. Naver will work with 33 other South Korean companies on the project – including LG, which will contribute 256 of its H200 GPUs to the effort. Also last week, South Korea’s government staged a meeting to launch the “AI for all” project, which aims to create a government-operated chatbot that will be free for citizens. DeepSeek may be going deep on Huawei GPUs According to a Bloomberg report, Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek plans to buy over 160,000 Huawei GPUs to power a new inferencing datacenter. DeepSeek apparently has its eye on Huawei’s Ascend 950DT, a chip that boasts impressive performance but can’t match Nvidia’s top products. If DeepSeek is indeed buying Huawei kit in such quantities, it suggests China’s government is not likely to authorize imports of Nvidia hardware and is more often enforcing its policy of politely insisting local tech companies shop at home. APNIC advances leadership diversity debate The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional internet registry for the Asia Pacific region, has advanced discussions on improving the diversity of people who serve in community leadership roles. The issue was the subject of a passionate question at the organization’s February conference, at which one member pointed out that APNIC’s elected leaders are all men with technical backgrounds, and that leadership hardly ever changes. APNIC last week published a summary of its consultations on the issue, which saw its members express a desire for the org to share more information about what is involved in becoming a community leader, and advantages such as coming from larger economies that help incumbent leaders to remain in their positions. APNIC will commence a second round of consultation at its September conference. ®