Elice Group (0158S0) will invest 330 billion won ($230 million) to build modular data centers in the Honam region and secure infrastructure including graphics processing units. With AI demand surging, the company aims to push into modular data centers, which can be completed and brought online faster than conventional facilities.
Park Jung-kook, chief technology officer of Elice Group, said this in a recent interview with The Seoul Economic Daily at the company's office in Seoul's Gangnam district. "It is hard to predict the AI market these days, but we are seeing a lot of demand for modular data centers," Park said. A modular data center is assembled from standardized components, with container-based designs the most common. All equipment and facilities may be housed in a single container, or about four containers may be installed with functions such as computing and power generation divided among them. The approach can cut construction time to under a year from more than three years.
Elice Group, which started as an AI education platform, is expanding its cloud business around AI PMDC, a modular AI data center it developed in-house. The latest investment is intended to build a 40-megawatt AI PMDC in the Honam region. "When a new chip comes out, there will be strong demand for modular data centers in the process of designing and validating facilities for it," Park said. "We are also getting inquiries from India and Indonesia about whether we can handle everything from construction to operation on a turnkey basis."
GPUs are cited as the main reason Elice Group began focusing on modular data centers. The need to design and build optimized facilities reflecting the performance of GPUs released each year is growing. That is also why liquid cooling is projected to account for close to 90% of cooling systems in modular data centers. Air-cooled infrastructure at existing data centers struggles to handle the high-density power draw and heat output that the latest AI GPUs require.
"Existing data centers were built without any assumption that water would be used to remove heat, so cables were laid underneath, and water piping later had to be routed overhead despite the risk of leaks," Park said. "A modular data center, by contrast, can be designed from the start with liquid cooling in mind, putting cables above and water piping below."
Elice Group has gone further, developing what it says is the country's first liquid cooling and outside-air cooling method using water heated above 40 degrees Celsius. "Water at 40 degrees can still cool a GPU running at 70 to 80 degrees," Park said. "Previously, data centers and cooling systems were designed on the assumption that cold water was safer, but advances in technology such as cold plates have made cooling with warm water possible." The technology will be applied to a modular data center to be built under a program to strengthen the use of AI computing resources, promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA).
Elice Group currently operates 10 container-type modular data centers across the country. It plans to expand them, centered on the Seoul metropolitan area and the Honam region. "Demand for data centers that work even in extreme conditions is going to keep growing, so I think it will be hard to go back to conventional data centers," Park said. "When new conditions emerge, the process of designing and validating for them is where our capabilities will show."