LG Electronics secured a major cooling infrastructure contract for a 5GW U.S. AI data center, supplying specialized cooling solutions for large-scale facility.
LG Electronics announced on October 5th that it has signed a long-term contract to supply cooling facilities for a 5GW-scale artificial intelligence data center with a U.S. company. While the contract amount remains undisclosed, industry estimates place it in the trillions of won. As cooling technology for high-performance AI servers has become critical to data center infrastructure, LG Electronics is gaining recognition as a rising force in the sector.
The customer is Air Control Concept (Air), a North American infrastructure platform company that designs, constructs, procures equipment for, and services AI data centers. LG will sequentially deliver high-efficiency chillers and related cooling solutions to Air's 5GW facility under construction. According to market research firm Omnia, global data center power capacity is projected to grow by 108GW—from 226GW this year to 334GW next year. This 5GW contract thus represents approximately 5% of that projected increase.
AI data centers concentrate high-performance graphics processing units densely in limited space. As computational performance rises, so do power consumption and heat generation, making rapid heat removal essential for server stability. This has driven surging demand for liquid cooling—which uses chilled water to extract heat directly from chips—alongside traditional air cooling.
LG Electronics is one of few companies offering an integrated "chip-to-chiller" solution spanning chillers that produce cooling water, cooling distribution units (CDUs) that circulate it to servers, and cold plates that absorb heat directly from chips. To meet accelerating demand, LG announced on October 1st an investment of 150 billion won to establish a chiller production base in Virginia and expand existing facilities in South Korea's Pyeongtaek and Changwon regions.
Fortune Business Insights projects the global data center cooling market will expand from 21 billion dollars this year to 54.4 billion dollars by 2034. Reflecting this growth, LG's AI data center cooling orders in the first half of 2026 exceeded 600 billion won, with cumulative year-end orders expected to reach several trillion won.
LG is also deepening partnerships with global technology leaders. Last year, then-CEO Cho Joo-wan discussed AI data center cooperation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Since then, LG affiliates have coordinated capabilities under a "One LG" strategy to pursue the market aggressively. LG Electronics has secured NVIDIA's AI infrastructure specification approval for its CDU products and holds preferred-partner status in power and cooling sectors.
Domestic competition is intensifying as well. Samsung Electronics acquired European HVAC company FlaktGroup last year and began construction on a new HVAC production line at its Gwangju facility last month. Autech Carrier was selected as the cooling solutions supplier for a 48MW-class data center in the Seoul metropolitan area in August.
LG Electronics views the cooling business as central to its B2B expansion strategy. As television and home appliance markets mature and Chinese competition intensifies, enterprise HVAC has emerged as a new growth driver. B2B sales, including HVAC, exceeded 35% of total sales last year, with a target of 40% by 2030. Lee Jae-sung, president of LG Electronics' ES Business Division, stated: "We will lead the global AI data center cooling market based on our differentiated cooling technology and experience supplying large-scale data centers."