Thailand's Energy Ministry addressed a critical infrastructure challenge at Gastech 2026: data centers submitted requests for 35 GW of power—nearly the country's 40 GW peak demand—but the ministry identified much of this as "phantom demand" (overclaiming for hedging). To prevent wasteful infrastructure investment, the government will include a more realistic 8.8 GW allocation in the Power Development Plan 2026 (PDP). This requires stricter vetting of actual demand, upgrading grid infrastructure (~$1B or 35 billion baht), implementing two-way grid systems to handle renewable variability, and enforcing grid codes to make data centers self-manage before burdening public networks.