Newshot Article title: Korean firms ambitious about gigawatt-scale data centers, but only megawatt-scale facilities have landed so far
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Korean firms ambitious about gigawatt-scale data centers, but only megawatt-scale facilities have landed so far
IT Home, November 13 news, according to a report by Korean media The Elec this evening (the 13th), in order to meet growing AI demand, Korean companies such as KT, SK Telecom, Naver and NHN Cloud have all proposed plans to build gigawatt-scale data centers, but the capacity of existing facilities remains only tens to hundreds of megawatts.
By contrast, overseas operators have long surpassed 1GW in scale, and Korean companies may therefore fall into a vicious cycle of unfavorable customer competition and delayed expansion plans.
As of November 13, financial reports and quarterly reports disclosed by Korean companies show that the data center capacity operated by KT and SK Telecom is 152MW and 137MW respectively, equivalent to only 13% to 15% of their respective 1GW planning targets.
At its third-quarter earnings call, KT proposed adding more than 1GW of data center operating capacity by 2031. The company's planned new projects total 911MW, but only 200MW of investment plans have been finally confirmed.
SK Telecom likewise faces a scale gap. The company plans, through SK Horizon, to expand the total capacity of its existing facilities and data centers under construction in Ulsan and Guro to 318MW. Such expansion progress also raises doubts about the feasibility of SK Group's separately proposed target of building up to 15GW of AI data centers.
Naver operates two data centers, GAK Chuncheon and GAK Sejong, in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, and Sejong City, respectively. The former has a power receiving capacity of about 40MW, while the latter had a capacity of 47MW as of October 2025 and is planned to be expanded to more than 130MW by 2029.
For these Korean companies, joining the ranks of large data center operators with 1GW of capacity still requires huge capital investment and considerable time.
Overseas data center operators, meanwhile, have entered gigawatt-scale territory. U.S. AI cloud service company CoreWeave's third-quarter financial report published on November 10 local time shows that its operating data center capacity reached 1.7GW, with another 4.6GW of power supply capacity obtained through contracts with other data center operators.
CoreWeave's expansion is backed by actual orders. Third-quarter revenue surged 168% year on year to 4.9 trillion won (IT Home note: approximately 24.51 billion yuan at current exchange rates), and the amount of customer contracts on hand reached 177 trillion won (approximately 885.354 billion yuan at current exchange rates).
CoreWeave CEO 迈克尔 Intrator revealed at the earnings call that, as of the end of 2027, the effective customer demand under negotiation has reached 10 times the company's current available supply capacity.
Korean companies also lag behind overseas competitors in customer competition. Naver announced at its third-quarter earnings call that it had signed a 20MW power supply capacity contract. Under Naver's plans with partners such as Brookfield, it will provide 200MW of data center capacity by 2028, but the portion signed so far accounts for only 10% of the planned scale.
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