LG Electronics is expanding its global chiller production capacity by establishing a new plant in the United States and expanding its domestic production lines to rapidly respond to the surging demand for AI data center cooling solutions and accelerate its market penetration.

Along with this, the company will continuously strengthen its liquid cooling technologies and product portfolio, expanding its business into a total AI data center cooling solution provider encompassing “Chip to Chiller.”

LG Electronics announced on the 5th that it is building a chiller manufacturing plant in Windsor, Virginia, USA, with the goal of starting production in the first half of next year.

The new chiller plant, featuring a total floor area of 32,000 square meters on a 170,000-square-meter site, will be responsible for producing air-cooled chillers primarily supplied to AI data centers.

A chiller is a cooling device that mass-produces chilled water and is utilized in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) across various fields such as large buildings, commercial facilities, factories, and data centers.

Because chilled water produced by chillers is used extensively for both air cooling and liquid cooling in data centers, chillers are considered a core facility for data center cooling solutions.

Through the new US chiller plant, LG Electronics plans to actively respond to the rapidly growing demand for data center chillers in the North American region.

North America is a core market where more than half of the world's AI data centers are concentrated.

According to market research firm Omdia, the power capacity required for global data centers is projected to surge significantly from 226 gigawatts (GW) this year to 420 gigawatts by 2030, with 60% of this expected to be concentrated in North America.

LG Electronics' US chiller production base is expected to establish a system to stably and promptly supply chillers locally in Virginia—an area densely packed with big tech data centers, often dubbed "Data Center Valley"—while serving as a bridgehead to aggressively target the North American data center market.

Jae-sung Lee, President of the LG Electronics ES Business Division, stated, “We will actively capture the surging market demand by continuously strengthening our stable supply capabilities in the cooling solution sector, which is core infrastructure for AI data centers.”

[ⓒ Global Economic Times. 무단전재-재배포 금지]