LG Electronics to Invest KRW 150 Billion in Chiller Production, Targeting U.S. AI Data Centers
IT DAILY ·
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LG Electronics will invest KRW 150 billion to expand its chiller production capacity for AI data centers.
It will pursue local supply in North America and expanded domestic production by building a new plant in Windsor, Virginia, and adding production lines at its Pyeongtaek and Changwon plants.
LG Electronics will also establish a test bed at its Pyeongtaek chiller plant in 2025, demonstrate solutions at the LG Uplus data center, and pursue supply of cooling solutions for a 20 MW AI data center in Wanju.
LG Electronics will invest KRW 150 billion to expand its chiller production capacity for AI data centers. On the 1st, LG Electronics said it had begun expanding production capacity in response to rising demand for cooling equipment for heat management as high-density AI data centers with concentrated CPUs and GPUs increase and AI data centers expand. A chiller is an HVAC system that produces large volumes of cold water to cool the heat of buildings, factories and data centers, while data centers use the cooling water produced by chillers for air cooling and liquid cooling.
LG Electronics will build a new chiller production plant in Virginia. To this end, it has drawn up a plan to establish a plant in Windsor, Virginia, and is pursuing the securing of a local production base in North America.
The Windsor plant will have a total floor area of 32,000 square meters (about 9,680 pyeong) and a site area of 170,000 square meters (about 51,400 pyeong). LG Electronics is aiming to begin production at the plant in the first half of next year, and the products will be air-cooled chillers for primary supply to AI data centers.
LG Electronics is also moving ahead with additional domestic production facilities. At its Pyeongtaek and Changwon plants in South Korea, it will add air-cooled chiller production lines and also expand domestic production alongside its efforts to secure a local production base in North America.
To respond to the North American data center market, LG Electronics will establish a production base in the U.S. and assign it the role of locally supplying chillers for the North American data center market. Virginia is home to a concentration of big tech data centers, and LG Electronics plans to establish a local production system to quickly supply chillers to North American customers.
Power demand from data centers is expected to rise sharply in the years ahead. Omdia projected that global data center power capacity needs will increase from 226 GW this year to 420 GW in 2030, and estimated that about 60% of that will be concentrated in North America.
Accordingly, LG Electronics is also expanding production capacity in South Korea. It will newly establish air-cooled chiller production lines at its Pyeongtaek and Changwon plants and will also upgrade the production facilities at those plants.
It will also introduce a flow-line system in which production runs on a single conveyor from the first process to the final process. LG Electronics plans to gradually expand flow lines at its Pyeongtaek and Changwon plants by the end of this year and operate multiple production lines simultaneously. The combined investment for the new U.S. plant, domestic production line expansion and facility upgrades totals KRW 150 billion.
LG Electronics said it will establish a test bed dedicated to AI data centers at its Pyeongtaek chiller plant in 2025, begin demonstrating liquid cooling solutions at the LG Uplus data center, and, in March this year, announced that it was pursuing the supply of cooling solutions such as chillers and CDU for a planned 20 MW AI data center in Wanju, North Jeolla Province. In this way, LG Electronics is expanding its cooling solutions business by simultaneously building test beds, demonstrating them at data centers and pursuing supply to new AI data centers.
LG Electronics said orders for data center chillers last year increased by about 3 times from the previous year. It added that it is broadening the product range of thermal management equipment for data centers, and said the supply scope includes chillers, CDU and cold plates that directly absorb heat from semiconductors inside servers.
LG Electronics is also pursuing a Chip to Chiller business that integrates thermal management equipment for data centers. To this end, it is combining cooling equipment with energy-efficiency management software, and also combining cooling equipment with power infrastructure solutions. Lee Jae-sung, head of LG Electronics' ES Business Division, said the company plans to continue strengthening its stable supply capabilities in cooling solutions, a core infrastructure for AI data centers, and actively target rapidly growing market demand.
Source: IT DAILY · Kim Byung-joo
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241959
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Source: IT DAILY
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