Thailand's National Economic and Social Development Council has ordered a pause on all datacentre construction and approvals in the country while it develops proper regulations for the sector. The move, announced last Friday after a meeting of the Council's Datacenter Business Policy Committee, follows an admission by Prime Minister and Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul that the government lacks reliable data on how many datacentres are currently operating or planned, at a time when public unease about datacentre development has been growing in Thailand.

Operators and investors have been given a week to submit information about their operations to help Bangkok build a unified regulatory framework and determine how many facilities the country actually needs. Early proposals include classifying any datacentre using more than 2 MW of electricity as an industrial business, introducing "resource utilisation fees" to stop indirect costs being passed on to the public, and creating an assessment process to ensure future builds deliver clear benefit to Thailand. The report also touches on other Asian tech developments, including Fujitsu saying it has not yet budgeted compensation for the Horizon Post Office scandal, NEC shelving commercialisation of its in-house quantum computer, South Korea's Naver leading a state-backed security-focused AI model using 4,000 Nvidia B200 GPUs, and DeepSeek reportedly planning to buy over 160,000 Huawei GPUs.