Thai Minister of Commerce: NVIDIA to announce investment plan in Thailand in December

According to Zhitong Finance, NVIDIA (NVDA.US) will announce its investment plan in Thailand, joining the ranks of Alphabet (GOOGL.US) and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US). Currently, Southeast Asia is becoming a hotspot for building artificial intelligence data centers and manufacturing the components needed for these data centers. Thai Minister of Commerce Pichai Naripthaphan stated on Monday that NVIDIA will announce its investment during CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Bangkok in December. He refused to disclose the details of this investment or how much funding the company will bring to Thailand. NVIDIA spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from reporters. Pichai mentioned in a later interview on Monday that NVIDIA's investment may bring more funds, and "related clusters will also follow suit." NVIDIA becoming an investor in Thailand will be a boost for this second largest economy in Southeast Asia. Thailand has been competing with neighboring countries for investments from tech giants. In recent years, Thailand has received billions of dollars in investments from Amazon (AMZN.US), Google, and Microsoft for building data centers and other cloud infrastructure. NVIDIA has previously committed to investing in building artificial intelligence infrastructure in Indonesia and Malaysia, and is exploring opportunities in Vietnam. NVIDIA's chips are manufactured by TSMC (TSM.US), and its AI servers are mainly manufactured by assemblers in Taiwan, China. Thailand has long been a manufacturing powerhouse for automobiles and electronic products, currently catching up with Malaysia and Singapore. Over the past decade, Thailand's average economic growth rate has been less than 2%, and the Thai government hopes to boost economic growth through this. Pichai mentioned that the interest of NVIDIA, other tech companies, and companies in the supply chain in Thailand should help investment applications return to the level before the 2014 coup, and help Thailand regain the "lost opportunities" of that decade. Foreign investment commitments in Thailand have surged this year, especially in the areas of data centers and printed circuit board manufacturing. Official data shows that investment commitments in the first nine months of 2024 increased by 42% compared to the same period last year, reaching 722.5 billion Thai baht (equivalent to 21.6 billion US dollars). Pichai said that new investment proposals, including those from domestic companies, could reach 1 trillion Thai baht this year