The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has set aside ₱300 million in seed funding to expand its artificial intelligence data center capacity, an official told lawmakers Monday.
Franz De Leon, director of DOST’s Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), disclosed the allocation during a House committee on appropriations hearing on the agency’s proposed ₱30.8 billion budget for 2027.
The funding falls under DOST’s grant-in-aid (GIA) program and comes as the agency pursues a plan to expand its AI computing capabilities 26-fold by 2028. Asked by a lawmaker how much the expansion would cost, De Leon said the ₱300 million represents only the initial tranche.
“For now, the initial seed funding given by DOST through its GIA is at P300 million,” he said, adding that the agency hopes to secure additional funding through development partners.
De Leon described ASTI’s current infrastructure as limited. “Currently, we have a small data center, it’s just a container van at the back of our office, it’s that small,” he said. The institute currently operates five major computer servers along with separate data storage servers.
To scale up, ASTI is turning to commercial data center providers rather than building new government-owned facilities from scratch. “We are starting to expand through commercial data centers, we rent a space, then we install our own GPUs,” De Leon told the committee, referring to the graphics processing units that power AI workloads.
The expansion is framed around building domestic AI capacity rather than relying on foreign infrastructure or platforms. “Our intent is to further enhance our own sovereignty, so we will have our own capacity to deploy and make our own AI-based application using our own system,” De Leon said.
For the Philippines, the move signals a shift toward government-controlled AI infrastructure at a time when public agencies increasingly rely on cloud services operated by foreign technology companies. A domestically hosted AI system would give DOST direct control over data storage and processing for government applications, rather than depending on commercial cloud providers based overseas.
The ₱300 million allocation is part of the broader ₱30.8 billion DOST budget currently under review by the House committee on appropriations. Further details on the timeline for the 26-fold capacity expansion, as well as the identity of prospective development partners, were not disclosed during the hearing.
