Gulf Edge Company, a subsidiary of Gulf Energy Development Public Company, has entered into a multi-year agreement with Google Cloud to provide sovereign cloud services in Thailand. This collaboration aims to meet Thailand’s strict data residency, security, and privacy requirements, while empowering key industries to advance their digital transformations using Google’s AI and analytics capabilities.
This strategic partnership is set to benefit sectors handling sensitive information such as healthcare, public safety, energy, and utilities. The goal is to accelerate digital transformations by leveraging best-in-class AI and analytics, ensuring that data, operations, and software sovereignty are maintained.
Under the agreement, Gulf Edge will operate as a Managed Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Provider (MGP). The focus will be on air-gapped configurations for organizations in Thailand, ensuring that GDC operates entirely within the customer’s environment without needing connectivity to a Google Cloud region or the public internet. Managed GDC Providers are partners that work with Google Cloud to drive the adoption of air-gapped GDC, providing expert deployment, operational, and managed services to end customers.
Gulf Edge will offer deployment options for GDC air-gapped environments either on-premises or within a Gulf Group data center. These options come with flexible hardware configurations, including general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), tailored to meet specific workload requirements. This would ensure that data, operations, and software remain entirely under the control of the customer, adhering to Thailand’s legal and sovereignty frameworks, including the Personal Data Protection Act.
By utilizing Google Cloud’s AI and analytics capabilities in GDC, various industries in Thailand can unlock transformative innovations. For instance, healthcare could see advancements in personalized treatments for chronic conditions, public safety could benefit from enhanced economic modeling and citizen-centric public services, emergency response could become faster and more efficient, and energy production could be maximized in offshore solar, wind, hydro, or biomass power plants.
Sarath Ratanavadi, CEO of Gulf Energy Development Public Company, emphasized the importance of this partnership: “Our collaboration with Google Cloud on Thailand’s first sovereign cloud solution with built-in AI and analytics underscores Gulf’s commitment to technological leadership and sustainable development. We selected GDC for its unique ability to isolate operations from the public internet while offering powerful AI capabilities. This will enable our mission-critical energy and utility systems to handle data-intensive tasks with heightened security and resilience. Successfully deploying GDC in Thailand is a strategic imperative, as its adoption across regulated industries will not only boost our country’s digital competitiveness but also create new revenue opportunities for our company. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Google Cloud to further grow our business in Thailand and beyond.”
Compliance with Thai Regulations
This announcement marks a significant step towards deeper collaboration between Gulf Edge and Google Cloud across cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity. It aims to foster digital transformation and startup acceleration in Thailand, positioning the country as a regional leader in digital innovation. The alliance would blend Google Cloud’s strengths in providing enterprise-grade AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools with Gulf’s leadership in power generation and digital infrastructure, particularly in green energy, data centers, and telecommunications.
The GDC solution is fortified by multiple layers of security to ensure maximum control, compliance with Thai regulations, and protection of confidential data. This includes security measures at the hardware, host, node, application, network, cryptography, Identity and Access Management (IAM), security operations, reliability operations, and compliance monitoring levels.
GDC provides access to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which includes core features such as Workbench, Pipelines, and Predictions, allowing for the rapid development and deployment of advanced machine learning (ML) and generative AI applications. Pre-trained ML models for Speech-to-Text, translation, and optical character recognition (OCR), supporting over 100 languages including Thai, are readily available. Organizations can also access other Google Cloud resources essential for AI-driven innovation, such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, the portable AlloyDB Omni database engine, and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics.
Karan Bajwa, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud, expressed his enthusiasm: “We are pleased to bring Gulf Edge on board as our first MGP in Thailand to deliver GDC air-gapped for local organizations. This next-generation, AI-enabled sovereign cloud solution will allow the public sector and other regulated industries to accelerate digital transformation on their terms, even when facing stringent digital sovereignty requirements. GDC empowers organizations to analyze data, uncover insights, boost productivity, and build modern applications while ensuring complete control and protection of their sensitive data.”
Google booth
