Hyundai Engineering & Construction has broken ground on Korea's first purpose-built commercial AI data center, a 40-megawatt liquid-cooled facility in Pohang designed around NVIDIA's forthcoming Vera Rubin generation of AI accelerators.
A prefab-first shot at a record-time build
According to reporting from The Korea Times on 21 September 2026, Hyundai E&C started construction on the site in June and is targeting operational status roughly 16.5 months later, in the second half of 2027. The build is unusual for the Korean data-center industry because every major concrete element — slabs, walls, staircases — is being cast at a factory and trucked in, a first-of-its-kind approach for a domestic commercial facility.
The compressed timeline matters. Hyperscale AI capacity in Korea has been throttled less by capital than by permits and construction schedules, and the prefabricated approach is Hyundai E&C's bet that it can outrun the traditional 24-plus-month build cycle that has left Samsung, SK and Kakao competing for the same handful of legacy facilities.
Vera Rubin ready
The Pohang facility is being engineered around a 1.25 power-usage-effectiveness target — well below the Korean commercial average — and roughly ten times the rack power density of a typical cloud data center. That is the profile required to host NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, the coming successor to Blackwell, whose blocks are expected to require liquid cooling as a baseline.
Who's in the deal
The vehicle is AI Factory Pohang PFV, a special-purpose company acting as the main contract counterparty. Korean AI-cloud startup Neo AI Cloud is the project developer and will operate GPU-as-a-service and AI platform tenancy from the site once it is powered on. NVIDIA supplies the accelerator roadmap.
"[This is] the first time a Korean commercial data center has prefabricated its entire concrete structure, including slabs, walls and stairs," Hyundai E&C said in describing the approach.
Part of a wider Korean AI-factory push
The Pohang project sits alongside a wave of Korean AI-infrastructure announcements this year, from Hyundai Motor Group's NVIDIA robotics reference platform to Samsung and SK Group AI factories tied to NVIDIA's DSX-Ready reference designs that fold on-site BESS into the data-center envelope. The differentiator for Hyundai E&C is that it is selling a construction methodology — not a chip stack — to a market where the constraint is now steel and concrete, not silicon.
Reporting based on coverage from The Korea Times.