Thailand Pauses 49 Data Centers, Readies Tougher Power Rules

The Thai government has asked developers to voluntarily pause construction on 49 data centres while officials finish drafting a new industry framework, according to Bloomberg. Another 128 projects sit further back in the pipeline (11 already approved, 117 still under review), behind roughly 35 sites already operating.

The draft framework, expected within about a month, sets a separate power tariff of around THB 5 to 6 per kilowatt-hour for data centres, against THB 3 per kWh for the first 200 kWh a household uses each month. The Energy Ministry said the principle was to ensure "large electricity users pay their own costs rather than shifting them onto other consumers," per Eco-Business.

To stop developers booking capacity they never use, operators will have to post a bond of 4.5 million baht per megawatt to secure grid access, refunded in stages as projects reach real usage targets. Applicants must also show evidence of commercial operations within five to seven years; miss the window and the assigned capacity is revoked and reallocated to industrial users. The deposit is designed to deter "phantom loads" in which developers reserve far more electricity than projects eventually consume.

Large projects will have to file water-management plans as well, reflecting concern that cooling systems could compete with households and agriculture for supply. First-quarter data-centre investment in Thailand ran past THB 1.01 trillion (US$31.8 billion), about 2.4 times the year-earlier figure.

The pause lands amid a run of AI-infrastructure friction stories on our AI Weekly tracker, from Sam Altman warning of 'unsustainable silliness' in the compute buildout to Nvidia's ballooning equity book in AI labs.