• The region is currently experiencing a rash of datacentre building projects
• Equinix is building datacentres too and says it has earmarked around US$500m to plough into Thailand’s digital infrastructure over the next decade.
• It’s particularly focused on the services needed to interconnect the cloud giants to each other, their customers and partners

Global connectivity specialist Equinix claims it has a phased investment plan for Thailand, kicking off with a $34m land acquisition in Bangkok, which will be used to construct a pair of Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) datacentres, handily located to serve existing digital infrastructure, and its customers and partners.

The two facilities are designed to house more than 3,000 cabinets, enabling Equinix to provide low-latency, reliable, digital services across Thailand and the south-east Asian region, according to the company.

Equinix joins the likes of AWS, Google and Oracle in the scramble to invest in cloud and supporting infrastructure in Asia, with an eye to the emerging AI market – see Cloud titans plant AI flags in Asia.

But while those companies have, for the most part, concentrated on constructing cloud datacentres and cloud regions, Equinix has settled into more of a supporting, but no less important, role specialising in the networks and connectivity required to make all the databases and cloud instances talk to each other and to their users.

That role is getting even more important as inter-datacentre traffic – already far larger than user-to-cloud traffic – continues to grow strongly as a proportion of the whole, spurred on by expectations for the huge global data flows required to ‘train’ the large language models (LLMs) necessary to sustain GenAI services.

Equinix reckons it has the systems, software and infrastructure to manage the complex low-latency data exchange between cloud datacentres, which is increasingly necessary as customers opt for multiple and hybrid public/private cloud applications.

Equinix, based in Redwood City, California, currently has well over 200 datacentres globally, linked by its extensive global data network and doesn’t just provide connectivity for cloud players to stitch together intercloud traffic links and provide user connections, telcos will likely find value in a global connectivity partner, replete with points of presence capable of hosting virtualised service functions for voice, 5G, content distribution and SD-WAN.

Orange, for instance, announced plans in August 2024, to team up with Equinix to expand its network and services reach and accelerate the development of its cloud-enabled New Generation International Network – see Orange turns to Equinix to expand its telco cloud footprint.

Thailand is a good place to set up shop for this role, too, according to Equinix. The government has a strong “cloud first” policy direction while a high internet penetration rate of 85% means the country is well-placed to capitalise on expected strong digital growth.

– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV