Efforts to build sustainable data centers to wash away the stigma of being “power-guzzling hippopotamuses” are emerging as a key competitive edge.

At the 'Network Korea Conference', an ICT device industry festival held in Samseong-dong on the 14th, Song Jun-hwa, Secretary General of the Korea Data Center Energy Efficiency Association (KDCEA), predicted that power efficiency in data centers will become a must.



Data centers, essential facilities in the hyper-connected era, are facilities that operate and manage IT equipment 365 days a year, and demand has recently skyrocketed due to the popularization of new services such as self-driving cars. The number of commercial data centers in Korea is 39 (as of the end of this year), and it is expected to increase to about 73 by 2027.

However, data centers have a high power consumption due to the dense GPU servers, and the cooling power to reduce the heat of the high-temperature servers also accounts for 40%. According to KDCEA, the annual power consumption of domestic commercial data centers in 2021 is estimated at approximately 4,808 GWh. This accounts for approximately 0.9% of the total domestic power generation.

As data centers are identified as a major culprit in carbon emissions, there are growing calls to improve energy efficiency. Director Song said, “As carbon neutrality is a hot topic around the world, we must start thinking about ways to achieve RE100 when building and operating eco-friendly data centers. This will be an important factor in determining the competitiveness of data centers in the future.”

'RE100' is an international corporate agreement that aims to convert 100% of the electricity used by companies to renewable energy. Although RE100 is a voluntary agreement, it is expected that by achieving it, companies will be able to get closer to 'sustainable data centers' that minimize their impact on the environment, and so it is being demanded by many companies. In addition, companies' efforts to respond to indicators such as 'Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)' are becoming visible.

Director Song said that in order to build sustainable data centers, it is inevitable to disperse data centers to the provinces. Currently, most domestic data centers are concentrated in the metropolitan area where customers are concentrated, but it is difficult to find a site in Seoul where data centers can be built, and even if one is found, it is difficult to secure profitability.

In order to resolve the concentration of data centers in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, the government revised the Enforcement Decree of the Electricity Business Act in March to provide grounds for refusing new electricity supplies to data centers.

Director Song said, “The metropolitan area is not suitable for satisfying indicators such as RE100 and PUE for data centers. “It may be difficult right now, but I expect that in 4-5 years, some data centers will relocate to places with better conditions for utilizing renewable energy,” he said.

For example, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy will invest 10 trillion won to build a RE100 data center in Haenam's 'Solar City' with up to 25 data centers. Recently, it has been revealed that new data centers are increasing mainly in the Gyeonggi, Incheon, and Busan regions.

Companies are promoting energy efficiency activities in data centers. Since the number of IT servers performing data center functions cannot be reduced, they have shown their will to establish energy efficiency systems such as introducing low-power, high-efficiency cooling facilities or using renewable energy.

Mobile carriers such as SKT, KT, and LGU+ that receive electricity from KEPCO have joined RE100 (LGU+ is K-RE100). In particular, SKT announced on the 14th that it had successfully verified the “liquid immersion cooling” technology, a next-generation heat management method that cools various servers by immersing them in special non-conductive cooling oil. SKT said, “As a result of the test at the Incheon office building, we confirmed that compared to the existing air cooling, cooling power was reduced by 93% and server power was reduced by more than 10%, resulting in a total power reduction of 37%.”

In addition, improving the efficiency of semiconductors for data centers to achieve power efficiency is also an ongoing task. AI total solution company 'DeepX' announced that its solutions, such as the 'H1' product that shows server-level performance, can reduce the massive carbon emissions of data centers by emphasizing their high efficiency and low power consumption.

Recently, global AI semiconductor company 'SAPEON' released 'X330', an NPU for data centers. The product has secured more than 4 times the computing performance and more than 2 times the power efficiency compared to its predecessor, the 'X220'. Sapion said, "Compared to similar products from other companies, our own performance measurement results show that the computing performance is about 2 times better and the power efficiency is more than 1.3 times better."