LG Electronics CEO Ryu Jae-cheol: “Cooling technology will determine AI data center competitiveness”

[Financial News] LG Electronics President and CEO Ryu Jae-cheol identified cooling technology as a key factor determining the competitiveness of AI data centers. As power demand for AI computing surges, it has become important to reduce the energy consumption of cooling systems and direct the power saved toward computing resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs).
According to LG Electronics on the 20th, CEO Ryu emphasized the importance of cooling efficiency and integrated thermal management technologies for AI data centers in an opinion piece for U.S. business magazine Forbes on the 19th (local time).
“The power usage effectiveness (PUE), a measure of data center energy efficiency, remains an important metric. But as AI computing expands, PUE alone is becoming insufficient to fully explain a data center’s energy efficiency,” CEO Ryu said.
He further noted that AI data centers must keep pace with rapidly evolving hardware, efficiently dissipate the heat generated by semiconductors into the external environment, and adapt to increasingly tight constraints on power and water resources.
To address these challenges, LG Electronics is exploring a range of technologies, from reducing the energy consumed by cooling to recovering waste heat and improving energy management efficiency across data centers.
One key technology is refrigerant-based free cooling. When outside temperatures are low, it minimizes compressor operation and circulates refrigerant to remove heat generated by servers. LG Electronics’ own simulations showed that it can reduce annual energy consumption by about 30% compared with conventional water-cooled free cooling.
The company also introduced technologies for recovering and reusing waste heat generated at data centers. LG Electronics is exploring ways to use low-temperature waste heat from data centers for building heating and hot water, district heating, and process heat at industrial facilities, using waste-heat recovery heat pumps and hybrid absorption chillers, among other technologies.
The company also emphasized the importance of integrated control technology that connects individual cooling equipment into a single system. LG Electronics’ data center cooling management solution, the Data Center Cooling Manager (DCCM), uses digital twin technology to monitor the operating status of cooling equipment, predict operating conditions, and control the equipment automatically. Its own tests showed that the solution can cut energy consumption by up to 40% compared with conventional methods. Coordinated control of the cooling water distribution unit (CDU) and fan wall unit (FWU) also raised the CDU load rate from 65% to as high as 80%.
LG Electronics is expanding its AI data center thermal management business with cooling solutions spanning chillers, CDUs, FWUs, heat pumps, and other equipment.
[email protected] Im Su-bin Reporter