World’s largest data center gets go-ahead from Korean govt — facility to require 3 GW of power

Investment firm Stock Farm Road (SFR) just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with South Jeolla Province Governor Kom Young-rok to build the largest data center in the world. The facility will be located in the southwest corner of South Korea with a projected cost of about $35 billion and a capacity of 3 GW, according to a report by Interesting Engineering. This would dwarf other data centers being built around the world, like Portugal’s Sines Data Center (1.2 GW) and Oracle’s 1 GW AI data center. This could potentially even be bigger than Elon Musk’s plan to put a million GPUs in his Colossus supercluster.

Construction on the AI data center is set to begin this year, with a target completion date of 2028. This is a bit shorter than the average setup time of four years that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once said, but it still cannot beat Musk’s record of 19 days (although that is for a smaller number of GPUs). However, it seems that the project will not just focus on the data center itself but will also include other infrastructure required to run it. It’s said that the project “will also feature renewable energy production, equipment supply, and research and development (R&D) initiatives aimed at long-term technological sustainability.”

Because of this, it is expected to have a significant impact on both the provincial and national economies, with a projected initial revenue of $3.5 billion. Aside from that, it will also create over 10,000 jobs, opening many new opportunities for people in the area and beyond.

SFR, which was founded by Brian Koo, the grandson of LG Electronics founder Koo In-hwoi, and Dr. Amin Badr-El-Din, is also planning to put up more AI data centers in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. within the next 18 months. The company believes that these investments will help build next-generation AI technologies, and will serve several institutions, including hyperscalers and AI developers.

This is probably one of the reasons why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that there’s an overbuilding of AI systems. He mentioned that his company would limit capital investments in AI infrastructure and instead lease capacity from existing data centers and investors such as SFR. Nevertheless, the software giant is already spending substantial amounts of money on its AI ambitions, including the restarting of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to deliver the power that its data centers require.