SK Group advances Ulsan AI data center talks toward 900MW capacity
The AMW Read
Incremental progress on a known SK–AWS Ulsan campus (900MW talks toward 1GW) updates the AI infrastructure player map and is a direct data-center compute build-out signal.
SK Group advances Ulsan AI data center talks toward 900MW capacity
SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won said talks on the group's Ulsan AI data center have advanced to about 900MW, speaking after the 2026 Ulsan Forum. SK is building an AI-dedicated campus with Amazon Web Services in the Ulsan national industrial complex at roughly 7 trillion won (~$5.2B). Groundbreaking was held last August, with operations targeted for the second half of next year. The site is set to launch at 100MW and scale toward 1GW; Choi said discussions with global big-tech partners for that expansion are moving at a fast pace, and SK plans sequential 1GW-plus AI data centers elsewhere in the Yeongnam region and beyond.
The update matters because hyperscaler-tied megawatt commitments—not model launches—are where AI capacity is being locked in for the next demand cycle. A Korea-based AWS-partnered build that is already near the 900MW negotiation mark, with a stated path to 1GW and more regional campuses, is a concrete Asian compute-supply signal: power, land, and industrial-site energy partners (SK Innovation, SK Gas, and SK Telecom leadership were on site) sit upstream of who can train and serve models at scale. Per the AI Market Watch index, the news pipeline logged 797 items matching SK in the last 90 days versus 592 in the prior window, name-matched ingested sources only—consistent with rising attention to the group's AI infrastructure push.
For builders and investors, treat GW-class campus announcements as capacity and distribution bets, not software narratives: watch which tenants and power contracts firm up between the 100MW start and the 1GW target, and whether Yeongnam follow-ons clear the same industrial-power and hyperscaler partnership bar before competing regions claim the next allocation.
