Digital Economy Minister Prasert says centre would aim to train 50,000 skilled personnel over 5 years
The Chinese technology giant Huawei has agreed to establish a centre to develop Thai workers in the artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud fields, according to Digital Economy and Society Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong.
The centre aims to produce 50,000 personnel within five years, Mr Prasert said on Thursday. The project is expected to generate income of 60 billion baht for these workers, address the shortage of AI and cloud personnel in Thailand, and turn the country into a regional AI and cloud hub, he added.
Mr Prasert said he was confident the Huawei centre could also help the country attract more tech giants to invest.
He made the comments after taking part in the APAC National ICT Roundtable 2023 on Wednesday, part of the three-day Huawei Connect 2023 event in Shanghai.
Huawei Connect 2023, which ends on Friday, brings together business leaders, tech experts, partners, developers and industry stakeholders from around the world to explore new opportunities for an intelligent future.
Mr Prasert said he also met with more than 20 Chinese technology companies in Shanghai and invited them to set up headquarters in Thailand as part of the ministry’s policy of promoting investment in advanced technologies that would generate new revenue streams.
Chawapol Jariyawiroj, president of Huawei Technologies Thailand, said the company is continuing to invest in Thailand, particularly in skill development.
“We need to reskill and upskill existing workforces and students to create more developers and more application use-cases,” he said.
He said the company aims to use AI in many areas, such as the state sector, medical, retail and manufacturing industries.
“We see opportunity in cloud computing for government, and more utilisation of the 5G network in enterprises and industries,” said Mr Chawapol.
Thailand’s Meteorological Department, he noted, is planning to use Huawei’s Pangu-Weather model, an AI model for global weather forecasting, to forecast weather in Thailand. The model provides a 10,000-times improvement in prediction speed, reducing global weather prediction time to just seconds.
Also at Huawei Connect, deputy chairwoman Sabrina Meng unveiled the company’s All Intelligence strategy. She described its ongoing efforts to dive deep into foundational AI technologies and build a solid computing backbone for China – and another option for the world – to support a vast range of AI models and applications for all industries.
As well, executive director David Wang announced the launch of Huawei’s new Atlas 900 SuperCluster. He said the latest offering in Huawei’s Ascend series makes use of a new architecture that is optimised for training massive AI foundation models with more than 1 trillion parameters.
A robotic dog powered by Huawei Cloud is seen at a booth during the Huawei Connect 2023 event in Shanghai. (Photo: Reuters)
