SK Group is preparing to announce a landmark plan that could reshape South Korea's artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The plan centers on building five 1-gigawatt 'AI Factories' across the country. But what does that mean? Think of it less like a traditional data center for storage and more like a massive supercomputing facility, densely packed with powerful GPUs designed specifically to train and run large-scale AI models. The concept has been heavily promoted by tech giant NVIDIA as the future of computing.
The timing for this monumental undertaking is driven by three key factors coming together. First, the financial firepower of SK hynix. Thanks to the global boom in demand for its HBM memory chips, crucial for AI, SK hynix has become a trillion-dollar company. This success provides the entire SK Group with the capital needed for such a massive investment. Second, there's strong government support. The recent passage of the 'AIDC Special Act' streamlines the complex permitting process for data centers, significantly reducing delays and uncertainty. Third, the technology is ready. NVIDIA has released reference designs like its 'DSX' platform, which are essentially blueprints for building gigawatt-scale AI factories, lowering the execution risk for SK.
The scale of this project is immense. A total of 5 gigawatts is an enormous amount of power, comparable to what a small city consumes. Consequently, the costs are staggering. The facilities alone could cost tens of trillions of won. When fully equipped with high-end GPUs, the total investment could soar past one hundred trillion won (well over $70 billion), depending on the procurement timeline.
In conclusion, SK's plan is more than just a construction project. It represents a strategic, national-level investment aimed at securing South Korea's position as a leader in the global AI race.
- Glossary
- AI Factory: A term for a new type of data center optimized for large-scale AI workloads, functioning like a factory that produces intelligence.
- Gigawatt (GW): A unit of power equal to one billion watts. A 1 GW data center requires an immense amount of electricity, often as much as a small city.
- AIDC Special Act: The 'Special Act on Promotion of the AI Data Center Industry' is a South Korean law designed to fast-track the development of AI data centers by simplifying regulations and permit processes.