On June 28, 2024, Thailand's Board of Investment (BOI) updated its list of promoted activities to include data hosting, which is listed as "Activity 8.2.4 Data Hosting Services."
Qualifying data hosting services are eligible for a corporate income tax exemption (capped) for eight years, along with other tax and nontax incentives, such as import duty exemption on imported machinery to be used in the project, the right for foreigners to own land, and work permit and visa facilitation for expats, among others.
To be eligible for these BOI incentives, projects must:
- Provide services for leasing host servers for data storage (data hosting);
- Have at least two data centers located in Thailand that meet or exceed the ISO/IEC 27001 data center standards; and
- Have an investment amount (excluding cost of land and working capital) of at least THB 5 billion.
Apart from the above specific criteria, projects also need to comply with the general BOI criteria, such as a debt-to-equity ratio no higher than 3:1, submission of a feasibility study report, and use of new machinery, among others.
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