LG Electronics will invest 150 billion won domestically and abroad, including the establishment of a new factory in the United States, to meet the surging demand for cooling equipment for AI (artificial intelligence) data centers. On the 1st, LG Electronics announced that it is building a chiller production plant in Windsor, Virginia, aiming to begin production in the first half of next year. The chiller plant under construction will have a total floor area of 32,000 square meters and a site area of 170,000 square meters, and will be responsible for producing air-cooled chillers primarily supplied to AI data centers.
A chiller is a cooling device that produces large quantities of cold water, utilized in HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) across various sectors such as large buildings, commercial facilities, factories, and data centers. Because the coolant produced by chillers is widely used for both air cooling and liquid cooling in data centers, chillers are a core piece of equipment in data center cooling solutions.
Based on the new U.S. chiller plant, LG Electronics plans to actively respond to the rapidly growing demand for data center chillers in North America. 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, global power capacity required for data centers is expected to increase significantly from 226 gigawatts (GW) this year to 420 GW by 2030, with 60% of that demand projected to be concentrated in North America.
Virginia, where LG Electronics is building the chiller plant, is a region so densely packed with data centers from big tech companies that it is called the "Data Center Valley." It is expected to serve as a bridgehead for swiftly responding to local demand while aggressively targeting the North American data center market.
In addition, LG Electronics will newly establish air-cooled chiller production lines and upgrade production facilities at its domestic plants in Pyeongtaek and Changwon. The company's strategy is to boost productivity by newly applying flow-line production equipment that processes everything from the first to the final process on a single conveyor, thereby meeting increased demand. Domestic chiller production lines will be expanded in stages within the Pyeongtaek and Changwon plants by the end of this year, establishing a system capable of operating multiple lines simultaneously. The total investment scale for the new U.S. plant and domestic line expansion is approximately 150 billion won.
Meanwhile, LG Electronics is accelerating business expansion by offering the full range of "Chip to Chiller" solutions, which are core components of AI data center thermal management, from chillers to CDU (Coolant Distribution Units) and cold plates that directly absorb heat generated by chips.
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