Gulf Edge Company Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gulf Energy Development Public Company Limited, has entered into a multi-year agreement with Google Cloud to provide sovereign cloud services within Thailand. This collaboration aims to support digital transformation across key sectors in Thailand by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities, ensuring sovereignty over data, operations, and software.
Under the agreement, Gulf Edge is authorized to operate Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) as a managed GDC provider (MGP) with a focus on air-gapped configurations tailored for Thai organizations. This collaboration integrates Google Cloud’s AI, infrastructure, developer tools, data solutions, security features, and collaboration tools with Gulf's expertise in power generation and digital infrastructure in Thailand. This partnership particularly targets sectors such as green energy, data centers, and telecommunications through Gulf's affiliated entities.
As per Google Cloud, GDC represents its sovereign cloud solution designed to operate entirely within a customer’s designated environment, independent of connectivity to any Google Cloud region or the public internet. Meanwhile, MGPs are Google Cloud partners tasked with promoting the adoption of GDC air-gapped configurations by delivering deployment, operational, and managed services to end-users.
“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”, said Karan Bajwa, vice president of Asia Pacific at Google Cloud.
The comprehensive security measures encompass 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. Leveraging GDC, enterprises gain access to essential functionalities of Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s platform for AI development. This empowers organizations to efficiently create and deploy advanced machine learning (ML) and generative AI search applications within their selected sovereign environment.
Pre-trained machine learning models for speech-to-text, translation, and optical character recognition (OCR), supporting over 100 languages including Thai, along with Gemma, Google’s open AI models, are readily available. Additionally, organizations can access a wide array of Google Cloud's hardware and software resources essential for AI-driven innovation within an air-gapped setting.
These include Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, the portable AlloyDB Omni database engine and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics. “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”, stated Gulf Energy Public Company Limited CEO Sarath Ratanavadi.
Gulf Edge has announced plans to provide deployment choices for GDC air-gapped either on-premises or within a Gulf group data center. These options include flexible hardware selections, such as general-purpose CPUs and GPUs, tailored to meet organizations' specific workload needs. This approach guarantees that data, operations, and software remain completely under the customer's authority and within Thailand's jurisdictional boundaries, adhering to all legal and sovereignty frameworks, including the Personal Data Protection Act.