In a striking demonstration of Asia’s accelerating artificial intelligence ambitions, two major economies announced massive financial commitments on Friday, underscoring the region’s shift from being a mere consumer of AI to a builder of the physical and digital backbone that powers it. South Korea revealed plans for a sovereign wealth fund exceeding 20 trillion won ($14 billion) to invest in strategic and advanced industries, while Thailand’s largest data-center operator, True Internet Data Center (True IDC), confirmed it is seeking a $2 billion loan to fuel its expansion. Together, the moves signal that the global competition for AI capacity is no longer limited to Silicon Valley.
The South Korean fund, to be managed by the state-run Korea Investment Corporation (KIC), will blend government assets with capital from state-backed lenders such as the Korea Development Bank, Export-Import Bank of Korea, and Industrial Bank of Korea, which will provide 16 trillion won. The remaining 4 trillion won will come from government stocks acquired through inheritance and gift tax payments. Slated to begin operations in 2027 pending parliamentary approval, the fund will prioritize profitability, stability, and public interest. The initiative comes as the country—home to memory chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung, whose high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips are critical to Nvidia’s AI accelerators—seeks to close a glaring gap in domestic AI computing capacity. A June report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that South Korea has no significant publicly available operational AI clusters, while nearly 75% of all high-tech AI computing clusters are located in the United States as of mid-2025.
Meanwhile, True IDC, owned by the Charoen Pokphand Group, is chasing a $2 billion loan that would be one of the largest private investments in Thailand’s digital infrastructure. Thailand has already attracted over $40 billion in AI and data-center investments over the past two years. True IDC recently broke ground on its seventh data center in early June, a 6 billion baht facility with hyper-scale capabilities designed for high-density CPU and GPU workloads using both air and liquid cooling, and scheduled to start operations in the third quarter of 2027. The loan would support that buildout amid projections that AI and generative AI spending in the Asia-Pacific region will surge from $73 billion in 2024 to $370 billion by 2029, a compound annual growth rate of 38.4%, according to IDC.
Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI) has approved a record 958 billion baht (about $29 billion) in investments, including roughly $27 billion in data-center and hosting projects led by TikTok System. Foreign players have also piled in: the BOI greenlit a $1.4 billion data center from Skyline Data Center and Cloud Services (backed by the UAE’s DAMAC Group), a $746 million project from Singapore’s Bridge Data Centres, and a $235.2 million GPU server infrastructure plan from Japan’s Datasection. Earlier, Amazon Web Services launched its Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region in January 2025, and Google Cloud opened its Bangkok region in January 2026 with a $1 billion investment expected to generate 1.4 trillion baht ($41 billion) in economic value over five years.
Despite abundant capital, power constraints remain the critical bottleneck. Thailand’s BOI now routes energy-related approvals through a new Sub-Committee for Energy Management, assessing projects on electricity availability, water usage, and environmental impact. The same tension haunts the global AI buildout: investment dollars are plentiful, but reliable energy and grid capacity increasingly determine which projects advance.
The dual funding announcements from Seoul and Bangkok illustrate a broader narrative: the center of gravity for AI infrastructure is drifting eastward. With the U.S. tech sector expected to pour nearly $670 billion into AI computing facilities in 2026 alone, Asia is racing to build its own capacity, combining state-led funds, private loans, and foreign partnerships to write its chapter in the trillion-dollar AI infrastructure story.
