Company wants to strengthen its resiliency and support its AI focus.
South Korean Internet company Kakao has announced plans to build an AI data center in Namyangju, a city in the nation's Gyeonggi province.
According to a Google-translated local news report, Kakao has decided to build a second data center in the region in an effort to strengthen its resilience and allow the company to evolve its KakaoTalk business, and focus on AI-related technologies.
Kakao previously experienced a significant outage in October 2022 due to a fire caused by lithium-ion batteries at an SK Group data center. The outage led to a government investigation and police raids, and Kakao was required to implement an emergency response system and compensate businesses and users that were impacted by the fire.
The new data center is expected to be complete by 2028. No further details about the facility have been disclosed; however, according to comments reported by local news outlets, Kakao infrastructure technology performance leader, Koh Woo-chan, said: “In order to utilize the servers needed for AI and data analysis in the future, we will inevitably use a lot of energy. We are preparing the next-generation data center with a capacity of around 80MW, which is twice the current 40MW.”
In June 2024, Kakao launched a data center in Ansan, also in Gyeonggi. That site is the company's first in-house data center and is capable of housing 120,000 servers. Located on Hanyang University's Erica campus around 30km south of Seoul, it spans 47,378 sqm (~510,000 sq ft) of data center space.
