![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/photo-taken-march-3-2026-shows-samsung.jpg\")
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This photo taken on March 3, 2026 shows the Samsung SDI battery factory of South Korean industrial giant Samsung.
\nAttila KISBENEDEK\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Samsung Electronics signed an agreement to build a 240 billion won \u2014 approximately $170 million at current exchange rates, versus the $158 million cited in Samsung’s own official conversion \u2014 HVAC production line in Gwangju, South Korea today, the largest manufacturing commitment at that campus in 37 years, planting its Fl\u00e4ktGroup cooling subsidiary in the one country where the demand for coolant distribution units is being created fastest. The agreement, signed at Gwangju City Hall with Fl\u00e4ktGroup Korea and the Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City government, turns a formerly appliance-focused campus into Samsung’s global anchor factory for the piece of hardware that makes AI data centers thermally viable: the Coolant Distribution Unit<\/a>.<\/p>\n What CDUs Actually Do \u2014 and Why AI Made Them Mandatory<\/p>\n A Coolant Distribution Unit is not a conventional air conditioner. It does not cool a data hall. It cools individual chips.<\/p>\n In a direct-to-chip liquid cooling architecture, a CDU sits between the facility’s main chilled water supply and the IT hardware’s own cooling loop \u2014 the tubes and cold plates that run directly to each GPU and CPU package. This separation is not incidental: facility water contains dissolved minerals, biological organisms, and chemicals that would corrode the precision copper cold plates mounted on billion-dollar processors. The CDU provides thermal isolation, filtering and conditioning a separate water-glycol mixture that circulates through the IT loop, while a heat exchanger transfers the chip heat outward to the facility’s chilled water without the two fluids ever mixing. Vertiv’s technical documentation describes how CDUs create an isolated secondary cooling loop<\/a> that prevents mineral and biological contamination of precision cold plates.<\/p>\n At the heart of the loop, a cold plate \u2014 a flat metal block with micro-channels machined through it \u2014 bolts directly onto the GPU or CPU package. Coolant flows through those micro-channels at a precise flow rate and temperature setpoint managed by the CDU, absorbing heat through direct conduction at the chip surface, where it can be removed most efficiently. The warmed coolant then routes through the CDU’s heat exchanger, releases heat to the facility loop, chills back down, and recirculates. The CDU also monitors pressure, detects leaks, and manages flow distribution across every rack row it serves.<\/p>\n The reason this architecture has become mandatory is physics. NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200 GPU draws approximately 1,200 watts<\/a> in liquid-cooled configurations \u2014 roughly 71% more than the H100 SXM’s 700 watts. Packed into the GB200 NVL72 chassis (72 GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs in a single rack), that translates to 120\u2013132 kilowatts per rack at full load<\/a>. Air cooling works adequately below about 30\u201350 kW per rack; the GB200 NVL72 requires roughly three to four times that. The Rubin generation, targeted for 2027, is projected to reach 250\u2013900 kW per rack. At those densities, the volume of chilled air required to dissipate the heat would be physically impractical \u2014 liquid carries approximately 3,500 times more heat per unit volume than air at equivalent flow rates. Liquid cooling is not optional<\/a> for GB200 NVL72 racks; NVIDIA designed the B200 to require it by default, not as an option.<\/p>\n Cheolgi Kim, Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Appliances at Samsung Electronics, placed the Gwangju commitment squarely in this context: “Samsung’s acquisition of Fl\u00e4ktGroup last year puts us in a unique position to expand the HVAC business and transform it into a new growth engine, to become a global top-tier company by 2030.”<\/p>\n A 37-Year Campus Record \u2014 and What the Scale Signals<\/p>\n The Gwangju campus has manufactured Samsung consumer appliances \u2014 Bespoke refrigerators, washers, dryers, and air conditioners \u2014 since Samsung established it in 1989. The new HVAC production line, spanning 21,800 square meters (approximately 234,700 square feet, or roughly the area of three football fields) at Campus 3 in Buk-gu, is the first major production facility investment<\/a> at the site in those 37 years.<\/p>\n That is not a routine capital expenditure. That is a board-level decision to reposition an existing campus around a new industrial priority \u2014 one that Samsung is signaling it expects to grow faster than its legacy appliance business. At 240 billion won, the Gwangju commitment is roughly 24 times larger than the \u20ac5.7 million (approximately $6.6 million) Samsung and Fl\u00e4ktGroup invested in the Pune, India facility that opened on August 12. India’s Pune plant, which produces up to 6,500 HVAC units annually, was the first production line under the Fl\u00e4ktGroup acquisition<\/a>. Gwangju is something different in kind: a manufacturing hub investment at Samsung’s home base.<\/p>\n The new factory will become Fl\u00e4ktGroup’s 15th global manufacturing facility, joining an existing network of 14 production sites across the U.S., Europe, and India that serves customers in 65 countries. Fl\u00e4ktGroup CEO David Dorney stated Samsung’s geographic calculus plainly in the official Gwangju announcement<\/a>: “By combining Samsung’s AI expertise with Fl\u00e4ktGroup’s HVAC product capabilities, we will be positioned to become an HVAC partner of choice in Korea and across Asia.”<\/p>\n Full operations are scheduled to begin in early 2028, a timeline the company says aligns with the wave of new AI campuses completing construction across South Korea.<\/p>\n Building CDUs in the Country That Needs Them Most<\/p>\n South Korea is not a routine data center market. It is arguably the most compressed AI infrastructure buildout in the world.<\/p>\n The national government has committed to 8.4 gigawatts of AI capacity<\/a> by 2029, backed by roughly 550 trillion won in public and private investment. The AIDC Alliance \u2014 a 12-company public-private coalition launched on July 29, 2026 \u2014 is targeting 18.4 GW by 2035, backed by 200 trillion won in state financing<\/a>. Samsung Electronics itself committed to a group-wide investment of 2,450 trillion won<\/a> across all businesses from 2026 to 2040, with a semiconductor cluster in Gwangju as its anchor.<\/p>\n Jeollanam-do Province \u2014 where Gwangju sits \u2014 is running the fastest capacity growth in the country, at a 23.05% compound annual growth rate<\/a> on new data center additions. The overall South Korean data center construction market was valued at approximately $7 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $14.6 billion by 2031.<\/p>\n A domestic CDU manufacturer, operational by 2028, means Korean data center operators building AI campuses right now can plan cooling procurement with shorter lead times and without the logistics costs of importing from European or American competitors. That localization advantage matters in a market that is building fast enough that cooling delivery schedules can become a genuine bottleneck.<\/p>\n Samsung has explicitly stated that the Gwangju line is a “strategic springboard for a full-scale expansion into the Korean market” \u2014 with HVAC supply targeted across multiple industrial sectors, AI data centers foremost among them.<\/p>\n The Stack No Competitor Can Replicate<\/p>\n The investment’s deepest significance is not the factory itself. It is what the factory completes.<\/p>\n Samsung’s Fl\u00e4ktGroup acquisition brought it CDU manufacturing capability. Its semiconductor division produces HBM4 \u2014 the high-bandwidth memory that populates every AI accelerator. Its DRAM division supplies the standard memory that AI servers require. Its building management platforms, SmartThings Pro and b.IoT, provide the software layer<\/a> for data center energy efficiency and climate control integration.<\/p>\n No competitor in the CDU or liquid cooling space \u2014 not Vertiv, which led the data center liquid cooling market<\/a> in 2025 with over 11% market share; not Schneider Electric, which acquired CDU manufacturer Motivair in early 2025; not LiquidStack, CoolIT, or Alfa Laval \u2014 also manufactures the AI accelerator memory their cooling systems are designed to protect. Vertiv can sell a CDU. Samsung can sell the CDU, the HBM inside the GPU the CDU cools, the server chassis, and the software that manages the building the server lives in. That is a vertical integration position in AI data center infrastructure that no HVAC or cooling specialist can replicate.<\/p>\n The CDU market itself is growing fast enough that Samsung does not need to displace Vertiv or Schneider to build a large business: Grand View Research pegged the global CDU market at $1.6 billion<\/a> in 2025, projected to reach $7.1 billion by 2033 at a 21.4% compound annual growth rate. The Asia-Pacific region led CDU market share at 37.9%<\/a> in 2025 \u2014 meaning the market Samsung is building domestic manufacturing for is already the world’s largest by geography.<\/p>\n The question Samsung still has to answer is whether manufacturing scale and platform integration translate into winning enterprise contracts in a market where Vertiv and Schneider Electric have decade-long relationships with data center operators globally. Fl\u00e4ktGroup’s existing hyperscale client base in Europe and Asia gives it a foot in those conversations. The Gwangju factory gives it the domestic delivery network to back them up.<\/p>\n Who Makes the Industry’s Cooling Hardware \u2014 and Why Samsung Is Entering<\/p>\n The global data center liquid cooling market was valued at approximately $4.8\u20136.7 billion in 2025, depending on scope of coverage, and is forecast to reach $18\u201329 billion by 2031\u20132035 at a compound annual growth rate of 18\u201331%. The range in projections reflects how quickly actual deployment is exceeding earlier forecasts.<\/p>\n Within that market, Vertiv holds the largest single vendor share at approximately 11% of the broader liquid cooling market (its CoolChip CDU family, launched at SC24 in November 2024, spans 70\u20132,300 kW capacity). Schneider Electric acquired CDU specialist Motivair<\/a> in early 2025, securing cold plate technology and CDU manufacturing capability, and holds a reference design partnership with NVIDIA specifically for GB200 NVL72 systems. Specialized competitors include LiquidStack, which launched its 10 MW GigaModular CDU<\/a> in June 2025, and CoolIT Systems (direct-to-chip cold plate designs).<\/p>\n