Partnership enables Thailand's critical industries to leverage Google Cloud AI in a secure, disconnected environment, in full compliance with data localization and protection requirements
Gulf Edge Company Limited ("Gulf Edge"), a fully-owned subsidiary of Gulf Energy Development Public Company Limited ("Gulf"), and Google Cloud today announced a multi-year agreement to deliver next-generation sovereign cloud services in Thailand that meet the country's most stringent data residency, security, and privacy requirements. This strategic partnership aims to empower organizations in Thailand's critical industries, particularly those involving sensitive data, such as healthcare, public safety, energy, and utilities, to accelerate their digital transformations with best-in-class AI and analytics capabilities, while offering data, operational, and software sovereignty.
Through this agreement, Gulf Edge will be authorized by Google Cloud to operate Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) as a Managed GDC Provider (MGP), with a focus on air-gapped configurations for organizations in Thailand. GDC is a Google Sovereign Cloud solution that operates entirely within a customer's chosen environment, requiring no connectivity to a Google Cloud region or the public internet. MGPs are strategic partners that collaborate with Google Cloud to drive the adoption of GDC air-gapped, by providing expert deployment, operational, and managed services to end customers.
Gulf Edge will offer deployment options for GDC air-gapped on-premises or within a Gulf group data center, with flexible hardware options?including general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs)?to address organizations' specific workload requirements. This ensures that data, operations, and software remain entirely under the customer's control and within Thailand's borders, adhering to all legal and sovereignty frameworks, including the Personal Data Protection Act.
With the ability to leverage Google Cloud's AI and analytics capabilities in GDC, organizations across a broad range of industries in Thailand can unlock new possibilities for transformative innovation, such as:
-Advancing personalized treatments for chronic health conditions
-Enhancing economic modeling and developing adaptive, citizen-centric public services
-Speedier emergency and disaster response
-Maximizing energy production in offshore solar, wind, hydro, or biomass power plants
Sarath Ratanavadi, CEO, Gulf Energy Development Public Company Limited, said: "Our partnership with Google Cloud on Thailand's first sovereign cloud solution with built-in AI and analytics reinforces Gulf's commitment to technological leadership and sustainable development. We chose GDC based on its unique ability to isolate operations from the public internet while providing powerful AI capabilities. This will allow our mission-critical energy and utility systems to handle data-intensive tasks with enhanced security and resilience. The successful delivery of 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. Looking ahead, we're eager to expand our partnership with Google Cloud, especially in areas where there are synergies between their technologies and our core competencies, to advance the growth of our business in Thailand and abroad."
Today's announcement paves the way for Gulf Edge and Google Cloud to explore opportunities for deeper collaboration across cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity to advance digital transformation and startup acceleration in Thailand, and further establish the country as a regional leader in digital innovation. This strategic alliance will combine Google Cloud's strengths in providing cutting-edge and enterprise-grade AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools with Gulf's leadership in power generation and digital infrastructure for Thailand, particularly in green energy, data centers, and telecommunications through its affiliates.
A multi-layered approach for sovereignty and security
GDC is reinforced by multiple layers of security to deliver maximum control, remain compliant with Thai regulations, and safeguard confidential data, including hardware security, host and node security, application security, network security, cryptography, Identity and Access Management (IAM), security operations, reliability operations, and compliance monitoring and testing.
AI and data-intensive workloads in an air-gapped environment
Through GDC, organizations can access core features (e.g., Workbench, Pipelines, Predictions) of Vertex AI?Google Cloud's end-to-end AI development platform?enabling them to quickly develop and deploy advanced machine learning (ML) and generative AI search applications in their chosen sovereign location. Pre-trained ML models for Speech-to-Text, translation, and optical character recognition (OCR)?with support for more than 100 languages including Thai, as well as Gemma, Google's state-of-the-art open AI models, are likewise accessible out-of-the-box.
Organizations can also access the broader range of Google Cloud hardware and software resources that are crucial for AI-driven innovation in an air-gapped environment. These include 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, said: "As part of our commitment to the Royal Thai Government to provide resilient and innovation-driven digital infrastructure for the country, we're very pleased to bring on board Gulf Edge as our first MGP in Thailand to deliver GDC air-gapped for local organizations. This next-generation, AI-enabled sovereign cloud solution will enable the public sector and other regulated industries to accelerate digital transformation on their own terms, even when faced with stringent digital sovereignty requirements. GDC empowers organizations to unlock new ways to analyze data, uncover insights, boost productivity, and build modern applications while ensuring they have complete control and protection of their sensitive data."