South Korea has so far attracted less foreign data centre investment than its peers. fDi Markets shows that $5.8bn of foreign direct investment (FDI) into ICT and internet infrastructure has been committed since 2019 in the east Asian country. A drop in the ocean compared to Malaysia ($39.8bn) and Japan ($27bn), and less than half of Thailand ($14.7bn).
A new venture aims to change this. Silicon Valley-based Stock Farm Road (SFR) plans to build a ‘mega’ artificial intelligence (AI) data centre at the Solaseado enterprise city in Jeollanam-do. A memorandum of agreement was signed in February 2025 to establish a public-private partnership (PPP) between SFR’s subsidiary Fir Hills and local partners including the landowner BS Group and Kim Yung-Rok, governor of South Jeolla, a province in Jeollanam-do.
Amin Badr-El-Din, the British-Jordanian co-founder of SFR, says all the necessary conditions are “pre-delivered” in the PPP for an initial phase of 0.5 gigawatts of data centre capacity. This includes electricity, water, permits, land and bandwidth connectivity to the US and within south-east Asia. If the project reaches its full target capacity of 3 gigawatts, SFR claims it would become the world’s largest AI data centre.
Financing needs
“Even the half gigawatt, is a very large project,” admits Mr Badr-El-Din. The question around data centres today “is how quickly can you deploy capital to be able to produce an output” and the SFR’s consortium has the ability to build this capacity faster than other developers awaiting approvals, he adds.
But it is early days. Mr Badr-El-Din says that their project has the partnerships and capital to start their initial phase, but the announcement is “a call to capital” to raise a mix of equity, debt and other financing.
“It is not fully funded, but it is sufficiently funded to start the programme,” he says. But South Korea has the “ability to put together really complex projects”, which makes it attractive to data centres, adds Mr Badr-El-Din.
Governor Kim Yung-Rok says that this proposed data centre “represents a pivotal opportunity for Korea” to showcase its commitment to technology and innovation. The data centre “will not only enhance our local economy but also contribute significantly to the global marketplace”, he adds.
‘More than business’
SFR’s thesis is that South Korea has the necessary expertise and capacity to solve the mismatch between global AI data centre demand and supply. “Korea has all the right components … power, water, data connectivity, land, permitting,” says Brian Koo, co-founder of SFR.
Mr Koo is a scion of the Korean family conglomerates LG and LS, which have business interests from chemicals to power systems, electronics and cabling. He says South Korea’s developed supply chains mean SFR’s data centre can locally source highly-demanded components like semiconductors, electricity transformers and substations.
“We want to really showcase how Korea can be helpful,” says Mr Koo. Korean companies “should not just think about building a manufacturing line in the US” but actually showcase their competitiveness at home. “US-Korea has a fundamental ally relationship. It’s more than just business,” says Mr Koo, noting that this project is an example of how the country can align with US interests.
AI hub?
But SFR’s plans come at a time of increased uncertainty over data centre construction and demand. Microsoft has cancelled more than 2GW of data centre leases in Europe and the US in the past six months, according to a March analysts note from TD Cowen.
Glen Duncan, JLL’s data centre director in Asia-Pacific, notes that “AI will be centralised to a few key hubs”, particularly for development of large language models (LLMs), which is not network or latency dependent. But he is bullish about Korea’s potential given it is one of a few Asian countries with significant nuclear power generation capacity.
“There is no reason why South Korea couldn’t stake a claim to be an AI hub, at least for North Asia if significant requisite power could be sourced,” he says.
PROJECT PROFILE
Fir Hills AI data centre
Company
Stock Farm Road, US
Location
Solaseado Enterprise City, Jeollanam-do Province, South Korea
Target capacity
Initial 0.5GW (3GW at full implementation)
Estimated investment
$10bn ($35bn at full implementation)
Expected job creation
10,000