AWS to invest $5 bn and help develop digital skills of Thai workforce

The company’s executives made the remarks on Thursday during the AWS Bangkok Summit 2024, which aimed to showcase the company's products and services, as well as educate the general public about the latest technologies and innovations, including the most popular, Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI), and cloud. 

The move is part of AWS's strategy to keep Thailand as its key market in Southeast Asia. To reaffirm its commitment, AWS reiterated its plan to invest more than $5 billion (roughly 190 billion baht) in Thailand by 2037.

The decision was announced alongside the launch of the new AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region, which will go live in early 2025. This region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, more options for running applications and serving end users from data centres in Thailand. 

Thailand is the fourth ASEAN country, after Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, where AWS has established its region. The new infrastructure enables the country to securely store data on its own territory, help customers achieve even lower latency, and meet demand for cloud services throughout Southeast Asia. 

The data centre is regarded as a critical component in the development of a strong digital economy, at the heart of operating cloud computing technology and artificial intelligence. 

During an interview with only three Thai local media outlets, including The Nation, AWS vice president of technology Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec emphasised Thailand's significant potential, which gave the company confidence to further develop its business since its initial presence in 2015.

That potential is the eagerness to learn and expose to new technology, she said.

"When we work and talk with Thai customers, there is a spirit of entrepreneurship that is very Thai. They want to learn about the new technology. They want to learn about how to make the customers' experiences better. Thai people can be so curious about how to build, invent, and start a new business and make it successful," she explained.

"And so when we think about our new AWS region in early 2025, we know that Thai customers would use it to invent new experiences," she said. 

 

Cultivating digital skills
Bukovec emphasised the critical role of humans in collaborating with Gen AI, cloud, and other technologies. 

Assuring that new technology would never replace humans, she said it would, on the contrary, enable people to work more effectively and productively. For example, instead of wasting time with "busy regular work", Gen AI can assist engineers in doing what they enjoy most: writing great code. 

A recent Access Partnership and AWS study titled "Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Asia-Pacific Workforce for Jobs of the Future", highlighted a growing AI skills gap in Thailand. 

Furthermore, despite understanding the importance of AI skills for both Thai workers and employers, 64% of Thai employers say they struggle to find the AI talent they require.

"We [AWS] always prioritise humans. As a result, we offer a variety of free online courses to anyone who wants to learn the fundamentals of cloud computing and Gen AI," she noted. 

In November 2023, AWS launched the "AI Ready" initiative, complementing its commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people worldwide by 2025.

The company now provides a suite of free AI and generative AI training courses aligned to both technical and non-technical roles through “AI Ready”, allowing anyone to learn AI skills. 

Meanwhile, AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognised certifications and in-demand cloud jobs. 

It is currently available to students at 26 Thai institutions across Thailand, including Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, and Chiang Mai universities. 

AWS has also launched various AWS Training and Certification programmes in Thailand to equip individuals with the right skills to thrive in a digital world, she said. The AWS Skill Builder, for instance, is a digital learning experience with over 600 free on-demand cloud skills courses including 62 in the Thai language, and a new online learning centre that makes it easy to build AWS cloud skills and self-paced digital training on demand when and where it's convenient.

This has been done in collaboration with organisations such as the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, and leading companies like CPF and Central Group, as well as various AWS training and certification programmes, she said.

"We are committed to upskilling Thai citizens to bridge the skills gap. We have trained more than 50,000 individuals in Thailand with cloud skills since 2017, and would train 100,000 individuals by 2026," Bukovec said. 

 

 

Gen AI a key factor

Citing Gen AI as a type of artificial intelligence that can apply human thinking to new content and ideas without requiring technical expertise in cloud capabilities, the technology would profoundly impact industries and society, she said.

"The general public's interest has recently increased significantly. The new AWS Thailand Region reflects AWS's long-term commitment to customers, allowing them to take advantage of advanced technologies such as AI and Machine Learning," she explained, pointing to Thai startup Botnoi Voice as an example of the growing use of generative AI in Thailand.

She said that Botnoi Voice had created a text-to-speech AI bot, which generates new synthesised voices in Thai, including local dialects, with exceptional naturalness and clarity. The culturally aware large language model uses AWS compute services to generate natural speech synthesis audios and save them to files. 

As a result, customers benefit from the ease and accessibility of Botnoi Voice's services, which improve customer engagement across industries such as financial services, education, and media, and allow brands to provide engaging and intuitive experiences, she said.

"They are going to help them do that work with generative AI without having to understand a lot of the underlying pieces," she added.

Meanwhile, she pledged to collaborate closely with the Thai government in all aspects so that Thai users could use AI and cloud services responsibly and effectively. 

 

Thailand as tech hub 

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin expressed his delight while welcoming the company's latest announcement during his opening speech at the event, as the upcoming AWS Region is set to launch in the country early next year.

He said it aligned with the government's "Ignite Thailand" plan, which aims to build a thriving economy based on innovation, creativity and technology through cloud computing.

He pointed out that the new AWS Region in Thailand would play a critical role in advancing the country's digitisation goals and meeting the high demand for cloud services, all while supporting innovation in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia. 

"We welcome AWS' US$5 billion investment in the new AWS Thailand Region, which will mark a significant milestone in Thailand's digital transformation. This move strengthens our national infrastructure and supports the expansion of thousands of Thai businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups. This investment is consistent with our vision for the Cloud First initiative, which seeks to establish Thailand as a regional hub for the digital economy in Southeast Asia," PM Srettha said. 

He believed that this new infrastructure would foster a vibrant community in which startups, small and medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and public sector organisations could collaborate, experiment, and thrive while having access to cutting-edge technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the Internet of Things, and others. 

"The AWS Thailand Region will promote economic growth, improve the digital skills of our workforce, and foster innovation. We are committed to working with AWS to maximise the benefits of this development for all Thai citizens, marking a watershed moment in our efforts to transform Thailand into a leading digital economy, providing a solid foundation for growth and competitiveness on a global scale," Srettha added. 

According to Thailand's Board of Investment, the market value of its digital economy is the second largest in ASEAN. Until now, Thailand has witnessed a digital revolution affecting processes, activities and transactions across almost every sector. The Thailand 4.0 policy implemented in 2018 had set the aim of transforming the economy into one based on value and digitalisation. 

Last year, e-commerce dominated the country's digital economy. According to Bain, the industry is expected to generate approximately US$50 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, up from the previous projection of US$36 billion in 2023, representing a 16% year-on-year growth. E-commerce continues to be the primary driver of the country's digital economy. 

The annual AWS Bangkok Summit provides an in-depth update on AWS technology and innovation, industry trends, and some partnership announcements with local companies. The event also welcomes members of the public who want to learn about or try out AWS products and services. Furthermore, AWS customers are able to showcase their services and solutions built with AWS products.

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most widely used cloud. The company said it now offers over 240 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management across 105 Availability Zones in 33 geographic regions. It has announced plans to add 18 more availability zones and six new AWS Regions: Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.