Gulf Edge to operate Google Distributed Cloud in Thailand

Gulf Edge, a subsidiary of Gulf Energy Development, will operate the Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) service in Thailand to meet the cloud computing needs of the country’s critical industries including utilities, energy and healthcare.

GDC is a sovereign cloud offering that operates entirely within a customer’s chosen environment, requiring no connectivity to a Google Cloud region or the public internet.

Under its agreement with Google Cloud, Gulf Edge will run the service as a managed GDC provider, with a focus on air-gapped configurations for organisations with data residency, security and privacy requirements.

It will offer on-premises deployment – including in Gulf’s datacentres – with flexible hardware options such as general-purpose CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs) to address the needs of specific workloads.

This will enable data, operations and software that run on GDC to remain entirely under the customer’s control and within Thailand’s borders. Google said the service is protected by multiple layers of security, including hardware security, host and node security, identity and access management, as well as compliance monitoring and testing.

Google Cloud services available through GDC include the core features of Vertex AI, such as Workbench, a Jupyter notebook-based development environment, as well as pre-trained machine learning models for speech-to-text, translation, and optical character recognition, with support for more than 100 languages including Thai.

Organisations can also access a range of Google Cloud hardware and software resources in an air-gapped environment. These include Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics.

Sarath Ratanavadi, CEO of Gulf Energy Development, said GDC’s unique ability to isolate operations from the public internet while providing AI capabilities will allow 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,” he added.

Karan Bajwa, Google Cloud’s vice-president for Asia-Pacific, noted that GDC 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 organisations to unlock new ways to analyse data, uncover insights, boost productivity, and build modern applications while ensuring they have complete control and protection of their sensitive data,” he said.