---
title: "LG will cool 5 gigawatts of American AI, and won’t say for how much"
description: "The chiller maker’s biggest data-center deal is worth ‘trillions of won,’ say the people guessing"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-05T04:30:51.221Z
modified: 2026-10-05T18:17:50Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/lg-will-cool-5-gigawatts-of-american-ai-and-won-t-say-for-ho-547777
language: en
tags: ["ai", "data-centers", "chips", "nvidia", "lg", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# LG will cool 5 gigawatts of American AI, and won’t say for how much

*The chiller maker’s biggest data-center deal is worth ‘trillions of won,’ say the people guessing*

By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/lg-will-cool-5-gigawatts-of-american-ai-and-won-t-say-for-ho-547777

## In brief

- LG Electronics signed a long-term deal to supply cooling for 5GW of AI data centers built by North America’s Air Control Concept
- The contract value was not disclosed; industry estimates put it in the trillion-won range
- The 5GW equals roughly 5% of the 108GW increase in global data-center capacity Omdia expects next year
- First-half cooling orders topped 600 billion won; LG sees cumulative orders reaching trillions of won by year-end
- B2B lines including HVAC topped 35% of LG’s revenue last year, with a 2030 target of 40%

Here is a sentence about the artificial intelligence boom that contains no mention of models, parameters or consciousness: LG Electronics said on Sunday it had signed a long-term contract to supply the cooling for AI data centers totaling 5 gigawatts of capacity being built by Air Control Concept, a North American infrastructure platform company that handles the design, construction, procurement and servicing of AI data centers. The Korea Herald [reports](https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10893397) that the multiyear program covers sites in the United States and Canada and styles the buyer’s name as AIR Control Concepts. The price of the contract was not disclosed, though the industry estimates it in the trillion-won range, and people in and around LG expect it to generate several trillion won in revenue, according to [Maeil Business](https://www.mk.co.kr/en/business/12168674). Several trillion won is a lot of money for what is, at bottom, air conditioning. But that is where the money is.

To see why, imagine — purely as a hypothetical — that you run a data center. You have filled a warehouse with high-end GPUs, packed tightly together, all computing furiously. Every watt they consume comes out the other side as heat, and if you cannot move that heat away fast enough, your expensive chips throttle or die. Blowing air over the chips — the traditional air-cooled approach — increasingly is not enough, so demand is surging for liquid cooling, in which coolant carries the heat directly off the silicon. The hobbyist PC people figured this out years ago; now it is national infrastructure.

How big is 5 gigawatts? According to market researcher Omdia, global data-center power capacity is expected to grow from 226GW this year to 334GW next year, an increase of 108GW. LG’s contract alone covers about 5% of the entire planet’s expected one-year increase. And consultants expect the buildout to keep compounding; McKinsey sees data-center power demand growing 24% a year through 2030, as we noted when [cheaper AI kept pushing demand higher](https://rews.cc/a/mckinsey-and-bcg-say-cheaper-ai-could-keep-pushing-power-dem-a14cce). Somebody has to sell a chiller for every one of those gigawatts.

LG’s pitch is that it can sell all of it: the chillers that produce the cold water, the coolant distribution units (CDUs) that loop it through thousands of servers, and the cold plates that sit on the chips and absorb the heat — a “chip-to-chiller” stack that the company says only a handful of firms can offer end to end. It has also collected the relevant credentials: Nvidia has approved its CDU products against its AI infrastructure specifications and named LG a preferred partner in power and cooling. To meet the demand, LG said on October 1 that it will build a chiller plant for AI data centers in Virginia and expand production lines in Pyeongtaek and Changwon, investing 150 billion won in total.

The market numbers explain the hurry. Fortune Business Insights expects the global data-center cooling market to grow from $21 billion (about 28.3 trillion won) this year to $54.4 billion (about 73.27 trillion won) by 2034. LG’s cooling-solution orders topped 600 billion won in the first half of this year, and the company expects cumulative orders to reach into the trillions of won by year-end.

There is also a corporate-strategy story underneath the thermodynamics. TVs and home appliances — what most people think LG does — are growing slowly and getting squeezed by Chinese rivals. So LG is pivoting toward business customers: HVAC and other B2B lines accounted for more than 35% of revenue last year, and the company wants 40% by 2030. The charm offensive goes to the top: last year Cho Joo-wan, then LG’s CEO, discussed AI data-center cooperation with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and the LG group companies have since been bundling their efforts under a “One LG” strategy.

Competition at home is heating up, if you will. Samsung Electronics bought the European HVAC firm FläktGroup last year and last month broke ground on a new HVAC production line at its Gwangju plant. Otek Carrier was selected in August as the cooling-solution supplier for a 48-megawatt data center in the capital region. Everyone in Korean manufacturing has noticed that the AI boom has a picks-and-shovels layer, and the shovel is a very large refrigerator.

“Based on our differentiated cooling technologies and experience supplying large-scale data centers, we will lead the global AI data-center cooling market,” said Lee Jae-sung, president of LG’s ES business division, in the customary register of companies that have just signed a big contract. The appealing thing about this corner of the AI trade is that nobody has to agree on whether the models are getting smarter. The chips get hot either way.