Samsung SDS Breaks Ground on 60MW AI Data Center in Gumi

Samsung SDS held a groundbreaking ceremony on 2 November in Gongdan-dong, Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, for a dedicated AI data center. It is the first concrete result of Samsung's roughly 60 trillion won plan to turn Korea's Yeongnam region into a global physical AI innovation cluster.

The facility will stand on a 14,000-pyeong site with an initial power capacity of 60MW. It is designed to expand in stages to as much as 120MW as demand for AI infrastructure grows. Completion is targeted for the end of 2028. In January, Samsung SDS disclosed an investment of 427.3 billion won in the project and signed a memorandum of understanding with the provincial government and Gumi city.

Built for GPU-heavy workloads

Samsung SDS says the hyperscale site draws on 30 years of data center experience and focuses on the high power use and heat of GPU servers. Plans include large-capacity power infrastructure, redundant key equipment and backup power.

Cooling will be hybrid. Air cooling will serve lower-heat equipment such as networking and storage, while liquid cooling, which circulates water, will handle dense GPU server areas. Server rooms will accept racks of varying power density, including future ultra-high-power GPU racks, so the site is not tied to a single GPU or AI service.

Internal and external customers

The company plans to run its own GPU-based services and also offer colocation, where customers install their own GPUs. The center will also support Samsung affiliates' manufacturing robot transformation (RX) effort, since training robots for precision factory work requires large-scale data processing and compute.

Samsung announced the broader Yeongnam plan in July. Besides the humanoid robot and AI data center work in Gumi, it covers solid-state batteries in Ulsan, AI server package substrates and MLCCs in Busan, and high-value ships in Geoje.

"We will combine our data center experience with cloud and AI capabilities to build AI infrastructure customers can trust," said Samsung SDS CEO Lee Jun-hee, adding that the company aims to lead AI transformation at manufacturing sites and offer customers full-stack AI services.