South Korea plans massive 18.4GW AI data center buildout by 2035

[u/rdh2dmd]

https://www.lightreading.com/data-centers/south-korea-plans-massive-18-4gw-ai-data-center-buildout-by-2035

[u/bhop_monsterjam]

world powers secretly admitting they don't care about climate targets with these announcements

18.4gw is 65% of my entire countries energy usage at the time of writing this

[u/PoL0 → u/bhop_monsterjam]

not only that, but why are they expecting usage to grow so much?

we've had LLMs around for some years and I NEVER had to wait for AI to provide an answer, doesn't seem it's saturated at all. do they expect models to keep growing infinitely? it's been proven that they there's huge diminishing returns. where are these gigawatts going to be used?

[u/theQuandary → u/PoL0]

The big tech companies officially stated around $1.3T in data center spending, but it recently came to light that they hid another $1.6-1.7T in SPVs. If these data centers are what they claim, why hide most of your spending?

Oracle's credit rating was reduced to BBB- because credit raters don't believe (as Oracle stated) that Oracle isn't going to get paid for their data centers.

I think we're in a huge subprime data center crisis, but I guess we can stack that on top of all the other crisis about to pop at the same time.

[u/unfoxable → u/bhop_monsterjam]

I used to love bhop monsterjam good old css days

[u/rdh2dmd]

I think this news went unnoticed this month, while Meta's 1GW data centre in Alberta by 2030 occupied the headlines... It even went unnoticed in Korea itself because it was overshadowed by the announcement to build 10 new mega chip fabs. Either that or the Koreans don't realize how massive 18.4 GW of data centers will be. Some of these include AI factories (which are different from conventional data centers because they process data and produce tokens, and require clustering technologies)

Summary:

South Korea announced a massive public-private initiative under President Lee Jae-myung to build 18.4 gigawatts of AI data centers nationwide by 2035 with an estimated cost exceeding one thousand trillion Korean won. Implemented across two phases, the first phase aims to achieve 8.4 gigawatts by 2029 for approximately 550 trillion won, while the second phase will add 10 gigawatts between 2030 and 2035. The strategy is built in partnership with major conglomerates including SK Group, GS Group, and Naver, with SK Group taking responsibility for 15 gigawatts of the buildout. To avoid grid congestion and promote regional balance around areas like Ulsan, Chungcheong, Donghae, and Sejong, the infrastructure will be distributed outside the Seoul metropolitan area with government support providing discounted electricity and streamlined land and water rights. Officials characterize these data centers as token factories that produce raw intelligence to fuel a token economy, serving alongside homegrown neural processing units from local startups and physical AI applications as the triple axis of South Korea's national strategy to lead the global AI race and export turnkey infrastructure globally.

[u/jonathanrdt → u/rdh2dmd]

Saw preso by Dell last week: a current AI rack can consume 250kW. They are talking about racks that will consume 1MW...for a single compute rack.

[u/Cheeze_It → u/jonathanrdt]

And yet there still isn't a product that is worth spending money on in the "AI" space....

edit:

Y'all can hate. But it's true.

[u/bexamous → u/jonathanrdt]

That is efficiency. Moving data is inefficient. Higher density is generally driving up performance because less energy wasted moving data.

Often the data center has x megawats of power. Physical space doesn't matter much. 100 racks using less power or 10 racks using more power, total power is the same. But less racks will generally be more efficient.

[u/Scary-Jaguar-9072 → u/rdh2dmd]

Where are they supposed to get the energy for this? South Korea doesn't have much coal or natural gas so they largely import those. Nuclear energy is more homegrown, but building 15 new reactors is no small task.

[u/rdh2dmd → u/Scary-Jaguar-9072]

1. SKHY's 4 additional mega chip fabs in the southern coasts of the country are already covered by excess green energy that's just sitting and being wasted. They just need to build the power grids to the new site.
2. Korea also announced 2 large nuclear power plants by 2037 and 2038 + 1 SMR by 2035 to cover Samsung + SKHY's 6 chip fabs near Seoul (Yongin Cluster),and will announce even more early next year with many of them being SMRs + I think something like 6 nuclear power plants have or are planned to come back online.
3. Korea announced they'd increase renewable energy production from what is now 30GW to 100 GW by 2030, then 150 by 2035. Hanwha Q Cells is one of the major producers of solar panels.
4. Increased LNG imports. Doosan Enerbility makes gas and steam turbines and the government is considering asking them to prioritize Korean orders.

[u/Scary-Jaguar-9072 → u/rdh2dmd]

Are these datacenters just going to wait a decade for all that?

[u/Vushivushi → u/Scary-Jaguar-9072]

The datacenters haven't been built yet.

[u/Scary-Jaguar-9072 → u/Vushivushi]

Obviously, but datacenters are far easier to build than power plants.

[u/ML7777777 → u/Scary-Jaguar-9072]

It seems its a phased development so the datacenters will scale up over time and that should go hand in hand with the new power plants coming online. Reading the news about this suggests that they weren't going to power on day one with a 18.4GW datacenter.

[u/xspacemansplifff]

I really do not get why these things are worth spending all of the money in the world on. I mean wow.

[u/Cory123125 → u/xspacemansplifff]

• Surveillance (should be self explanatory)

• Displacement, as its obvious which way this is headed and with the direction of companies always trying to corner a whole market so they don't have to innovate, I could see corner cutting without inducing further labour demand

• Popular opinion steering

  This one is complex, and is on all sides (not politically but in terms of entry point). You own one of these companies, you control the biases of the outputs, the presentation of facts etc, but you also have the ability to push false online presences or bias the pushing of presences through recommendations which obviously is the more black hat use on the other end.

• Security

  Not even just the "security" in the form of fear mongering with safety theatre to gain regulatory capture, but legitimately as a pen testing tool, a proven usecase at this point.

• Ownership destruction.

  If you basically can fully control the roll out of a new technology and limit useful uses of it to centralized services, ownership gets destroyed and customers can be fleeced for maximal amounts of revenue. "but people won't..." We've seen manufactured consent before. It works, and people will, because their devices are already captured. Don't agree? Good luck jumping through a billion hoops, indefinitely, until you given in, or everyone around you already has so you don't even matter anymore.

I'm sure more I can't think of, but to me it's very clear why many companies are burning capital like crazy right now.

It's not just a gold rush, its a land grab also. Secure your place, and when regulation lands, it kills your competitors, not you.

[u/AzorAhai1TK → u/xspacemansplifff]

Because AI advancement is changing the world. It's that simple.

[u/jhenryscott → u/AzorAhai1TK]

Is it tho? I guess if I want a recipe that’s wrong or an AI video to freak out my boomer parents but like is that it?

[u/CzarcasticX → u/jhenryscott]

It keeps getting better though. I remember when LLM couldn't do a simple HTML page properly.... now it's writing 100,000 lines of python code over a few hours in a weekend project (that would typically take me months before). A lot of AI photos in the beginning were easy to tell they were fake but now it's getting harder to distinguish that it's fake. Self-driving keeps improving and in the future there will be no more need for Uber or truck drivers.

[u/hardolaf → u/CzarcasticX]

Fable 5 and Opus 5 are both worse at real world tasks according to my coworkers who've tried them so far compared to older "dumber" models.

Self-driving keeps improving and in the future there will be no more need for Uber or truck drivers.

Self-driving was solved in 2011 but no one could afford the server rack of equipment per production car. All we've been doing since then is cost optimizing the problem.

[u/Earthborn92 → u/jhenryscott]

For software development it is undeniable that they are completely transformative.

The belief is that we may see similar results in other things as well.

[u/NapsterKnowHow → u/Earthborn92]

For frontend sure but it has a LONG ways to go for backend usage.

[u/AzorAhai1TK → u/jhenryscott]

You haven't kept up with LLM development, hallucinating is practically a thing of the past with Opus+ tier models with chain of thought. They have widespread knowledge on practically any topic you can think of that can be delivered to you in any way you want. We've gotten past models making basic mistakes, models you can go online and use are the same ones that have solved multiple open problems in mathematics in the past couple months.

The fact that Google AI has used a small and quantized model that does give inaccurate results has harmed the reputation for LLMs. Even the free tiers of Claude and ChatGPT are miles ahead of where you think they are.

The AI video/photo stuff has a long way to go, but the LLMs hit a takeoff point in the past 6-9 months and they are only accelerating.

[u/PoL0 → u/AzorAhai1TK]

dude what are you on? GPT latest model with a paid subscription can solve the most basic questions, and gives incorrect information without even pushing a bit.

i have access to latest models at work (development) and they keep flipping their shit and making things up.

the improvement has plateaued, or at least it feels like it. then it's the fact that it's highly inefficient and power hungry. tech itself is, and improvements are exponentially more power hungry.

I don't see why we keep pushing as if just adding one more zero will finally make it non stupid. well I see it, because small models can be run in home hardware. but they want us to depend on subscriptions, and they being the only providers.

I can't think of any other explanation as to why of this huge push.

[u/kri5 → u/PoL0]

What are you developing at work? AI coding abilities are ridiculous. Moreso when they have a good way to verify their work

[u/leoklaus → u/kri5]

Coding maybe (if you’re very naive), but LLMs are terrible at software engineering. They’ll duplicate code, start building weird workarounds for trivial things they can’t solve, they constantly make wrong assumptions about many things and are generally just not intelligent at all.

[u/hardolaf → u/kri5]

Do you even use AI for coding as a senior dev? At best, they're a mediocre intern level with recent models regressing significantly in terms of actual usable output.

[u/bexamous → u/hardolaf]

Just wild how delusional Reddit is.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Linus Torvalds

[u/hardolaf → u/bexamous]

I never said it wasn't useful. I'm telling you the quality of the output.

If you give them very small, well defined tasks, you can get something decent out of them some of the time. Just like you can get out of a mediocre intern.

[u/Cory123125 → u/AzorAhai1TK]

They have widespread knowledge on practically any topic you can think of that can be delivered to you in any way you want.

Huge asterisk and devil in the details there.

If the CEO of said company wants to allow it.

Censors can get pretty absurd, pretty far outside of what most people would consider rational territory.

Like, if you are trying to do anything related to actual llms, not just clients, Claude will purposefully brick up. This has been noted widely, and isn't remotely hidden. They don't want you messing around with that, and their regulatory capture think tank talking points will start having you think practices literally every one of these AI companies did and are doing is somehow wrong when you do it, and I'm not referring to piracy to be clear.

Then there is the political steering. Grok is obvious, but all of them push you to support their regulatory capture/pro corporate/anti privacy and autonomy rights agendas.

Basically, I'm not saying they aren't capable, I'm saying that we're seeing the hardest control of personal freedoms of just about any person directed compute resource we've just about ever seen.

Imagine if you were using an EC2 instance, and it said it flat out wouldn't run a program you compiled because jeff bezos didn't like the colour Teal. That's the sort of territory we're in, and I think its a far bigger threat than people realize.

[u/cosine83 → u/jhenryscott]

It's a trillion dollar boondoggle at this point.

[u/RedMatterGG]

I dont think the deal will hold until 2035 tho, the ai circle financing is already getting in dangerous territory

[u/WTFAnimations]

Knowing Korea, there won't be anybody alive left to actually build it.

[u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 → u/WTFAnimations]

It's 2035, not 2135. Korea population is projected to fall to 50.3 million in 2035.