off-prem
PLUS: Fujitsu not yet budgeting Horizon compensation; DeepSeek's vast Huawei GPU buy; Korea plans sovereign security model; and more
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 compensationThe 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
