Hyundai Engineering & Construction has begun construction of a high-performance artificial intelligence data center in Pohang, South Korea, as demand for infrastructure capable of handling increasingly intensive AI workloads continues to grow.
Hyundai E&C said on September 21 that it had finalized the main construction contract for the Pohang AI Data Center project, commissioned by AI Factory Pohang PFV, and has started installing precast concrete structures at the site.
Located in the Gwangmyeong General Industrial Complex in Ocheon-eup, Nam-gu, Pohang, the facility will have a power capacity of 40 megawatts and an IT load of 32 megawatts. Construction began in June, with the facility scheduled to become operational in the second half of next year. The overall construction period is set at 16.5 months.
Unlike conventional data centers designed primarily for general-purpose cloud computing, the Pohang facility is being developed specifically for AI workloads. Its GPU-based infrastructure will be designed to handle large-scale data processing and real-time AI computing.
The facility will also be built with future GPU upgrades in mind. Hyundai E&C plans to create an ultra-high-density environment capable of supporting GPU servers based on NVIDIA’s latest Vera Rubin AI chips.
Power density at the facility is expected to be roughly 10 times higher than that of conventional cloud data centers. The project will also introduce a liquid-cooling system to manage the significant heat generated by high-performance AI servers.
The facility has been designed with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) target of 1.25, aimed at minimizing energy losses associated with data center operations.
Construction speed is another key feature of the project. Hyundai E&C is applying precast concrete, or PC, construction throughout the concrete structural system. Slabs, walls and stairs, as well as beams and columns, will be manufactured in advance and assembled on site.
While PC components have previously been used selectively in commercial data centers in Korea, the Pohang project is the first domestic case in which the method is being applied across the entire concrete structure, according to Hyundai E&C.
The company expects the approach to reduce structural construction time from roughly one year under conventional cast-in-place methods to approximately two months.
Factory production is also expected to help improve construction quality and safety while reducing the amount of work required at the construction site.
The project is being developed by Neo AI Cloud, which plans to operate the facility as an expandable infrastructure platform capable of accommodating next-generation GPUs. The company also plans to connect the data center with GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI platform services to support AI model development and service operations for companies in Korea and overseas.
Hyundai E&C said the project reflects a broader shift in the data center industry, where speed to deployment is becoming increasingly important alongside capacity and technical specifications.
“As generative AI and large-scale AI models continue to expand, competitiveness in the data center market is increasingly determined not only by scale but also by Time-to-Market,” a Hyundai E&C official said.
The company plans to complete the Pohang AI Data Center within the scheduled construction period while demonstrating its capabilities in project execution, quality management and high-density AI infrastructure.
