DATA CENTER MARKET

Data centers vary in size from smallscale facilities with a few dozen racks to hyperscale centers with thousands of racks. They are also categorized by user type and operational purpose: Enterprise (self-use), Colocation (commercial), Cloud, and AI-specialized centers. Enterprise data centers are privately developed and operated by corporations for internal use. In contrast, Colocation and Cloud facilities are commercially operated, typically by landlords who lease space to one or multiple tenants. AI-specialized centers, a rapidly emerging subcategory, are designed specifically to meet the high-density, GPU-based computing needs of artificial intelligence workloads. Since the pandemic, companies have increasingly shifted from in-house infrastructure to thirdparty data centers, driven by the benefits of cost efficiency, regulatory compliance, and access to advanced technologies. Recently, rising demand for generative AI is driving increased interest in GPU-based, highperformance AI data centers.

DEMAND

Demand for data centers in Korea is largely driven by cloud service providers (CSPs), particularly global players such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to 2023 statistics from the Ministry of Science and ICT, around 70% of value-added telecom service providers1 — including OTT, portal sites, and e-commerce platforms—utilize cloud services from these three major CSPs. Each CSP designates Regions2 at the metropolitan level. In Korea, these three global CSPs each operate a single region, all located within the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA).