South Korean firm wins Saudi customer
LG Electronics is to provide cooling equipment to Saudi data center firm DataVolt.
The company this week announced a strategic partnership to provide cooling solutions for an AI data center under development in Oxagon, the industrial hub of Saudi Arabia’s Neom City project.
LG CEO William Cho met with Abdulelah Abunayyan, chairman of local partner Shaker Group, and DataVolt CEO Rajit Nanda. The three signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) under which LG will supply advanced thermal management solutions for data centers being developed by DataVolt.
Riyadh-based DataVolt was founded in 2023 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vision Invest, a Saudi Arabian development and investment holding company focused on critical infrastructure.
As well as its Oxagon project and Riyadh facility in Saudi, Datavolt is developing data centers in Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, and other parts of Asia.
Neom is a city being built by Saudi Arabia in Tabuk Province. Oxagon is the floating industrial city under development in the southwest corner of the Neom development, on the Red Sea Coast. Several data center developments are coming to the area. Plans for the 1.5GW Oxagon data center were announced in February. The first 300MW phase of the site will reportedly go live in 2028.
“We are building a new generation of net-zero, AI-ready data centers designed for performance, scale and sustainability,” said Rajit Nanda, CEO of Datavolt. “Partnering with LG allows us to integrate world-class cooling technologies that are critical to enabling the digital transformation of governments and enterprises across the Kingdom of Saudi and beyond.”
LG said the partnership also opens opportunities beyond thermal management and into battery solutions from LG Energy Solution and data center design, build, and operation solutions from LG CNS.
“The Middle East and Africa hold tremendous potential,” said CEO Cho. “The Middle East offers abundant B2G and B2B opportunities driven by government-led industrial restructuring and large-scale development projects. By leveraging our strong brand and differentiated offerings in areas such as AI home and smart solutions, we need to focus on capturing new growth across the region.”
LG is aiming to become a bigger player in the data center cooling space, integrating large-scale chillers with coolant distribution units. As well as cooling, LG said it is developing capabilities to propose integrated solutions such as heat recovery and DC power systems.
“Our 30-year partnership with LG has been instrumental in shaping the HVAC market in Saudi Arabia, and today’s collaboration marks another step forward in that journey,” said Mohammed Ibrahim Abunayyan, CEO of Shaker Group. “By joining forces with LG and DataVolt, we are driving innovation in advanced, energy-efficient cooling solutions and supporting the Kingdom’s ambition to become a global technology hub.”
LG and Shaker have developed outdoor units with heat exchangers engineered to withstand sandstorms and high temperatures, produced at the local LG-Shaker manufacturing facility.
Source: DCD
