LG scion in talks to build South Korea’s largest data centre
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The largest such centres operating now are less than one gigawatt.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SEOUL - Mr Brian Koo, whose extended family controls the LG Group, is backing the construction of a data centre that aims to be South Korea’s largest, making him the latest entrepreneur to enter the global AI infrastructure race.
Stock Farm Road, a new venture co-founded by Mr Koo and partner Amin Badr-El-Din, plans to build a data centre with 3 gigawatts of power-receiving capacity by 2028 in south-west South Korea. Mr Koo’s investment firm, Fir Hills, has signed a preliminary agreement with Governor Kim Yung-rok of South Korea’s Jeollanamdo province, the venture said in a statement on Feb 18.
A representative of Jeollanamdo province declined to comment.
The project – with an initial size of some US$10 billion (S$13.4 billion) – will feature advanced cooling infrastructure and the capability to handle power load fluctuations to better support artificial intelligence (AI), according to the statement.
The push could grow into a US$35 billion endeavour, the statement read. A representative of Stock Farm would not elaborate on how or where it would raise that capital, other than saying the funding will come from a group of international investors.
If the project goes as planned, it will match the size of Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Group’s planned data centre in India and dwarf existing data centres in capacity.
The largest such centres operating now are less than one gigawatt, according to data from market intelligence firm DC Byte, although tech providers are increasingly floating bigger projects to meet AI’s voracious computing needs.
Such discussions are taking place as Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s low-cost and open-source AI raises the prospect of a far less lucrative tech landscape ahead. bloomberg
