📅 2 November 2026 • The Korea Times
LG CNS has completed construction of a 30 MW hyperscale AI data center in Jakarta, with the announcement made on 2 November 2026. The project makes the Korean IT services company the first from Korea to build an AI data center outside the country for a local customer. The facility is finished, fully committed to a tenant, and marks the entry of Korean data center engineering into one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing digital markets.
Demand arrived before construction did. 100% of the facility's capacity was contracted before the build was completed. The customer is KMG, a joint venture between Indonesia's Sinar Mas Group and Korea Investment Real Asset Management. Full pre-completion occupancy stands out in an industry where operators usually lease capacity in stages over the first years of operation, and it reflects how scarce AI-ready capacity has become in the region as training and inference workloads grow faster than new supply can come online. For KMG the arrangement secures long-term AI capacity inside Indonesia at a moment when AI workloads are competing for space across APAC.
The technical design is built around AI workloads rather than conventional hosting. The power system sustains more than 300 kW per rack, roughly 60 times the density of a typical data center rack. That level of per-rack power is what modern GPU clusters for model training draw, and it shapes most other engineering choices in the building. Cooling follows a hybrid approach: air-based cooling serves phase 1, while liquid cooling is planned for subsequent phases as rack densities climb further.
The Jakarta site is a first phase, not a finished campus. The next stage of construction will raise total capacity to 400 MW, a scale that would place the facility among the largest AI data centers in Indonesia. The project therefore doubles as a capacity plan for a market where local compute supply is being built out under pressure from demand.
LG CNS positions the project as the start of a regional 'AI factory' business — data center capacity operated as a production input for AI development rather than general-purpose hosting. The company plans expansion across APAC, naming Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan as target markets. The list of target markets mirrors where digital economies in the region are scaling and where governments are pushing for in-country data infrastructure. For enterprises planning AI workloads in the region, the project adds in-country capacity options at a time when data residency requirements and local compute demand are both rising across Southeast Asia.
IMPACT: Who is affected — AI teams, cloud and infrastructure buyers planning compute in Southeast Asia, plus colocation, energy and construction partners in the region. What changes — regional buyers gain a contract-ready option for AI capacity, with 30 MW operational now and 400 MW planned, and rack densities above 300 kW push liquid-cooling readiness up the checklist for anyone building AI-grade sites. What to watch — the pace of the 400 MW expansion, contract structures around the KMG joint venture, and LG CNS entries into Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.
Sources: koreatimes.co.kr, biz.chosun.com
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