·PAJU, Gyeonggi — The heat hit first, then the dust.
·Cranes swung overhead against a hazy sky as concrete pump trucks idled below, and inside the half-built shell of Building 1, the air was thick with the grit of a site that is only about 20 percent finished.
·Workers in hard hats threaded between bare concrete columns that climb five stories, past pipe racks already roughly 70 percent installed, while reporters in borrowed safety vests picked their way along a marked corridor.
·This raw, unfinished floor, a first-floor machine room still open to the elements, is where LG U+, the country's telco provider, on Friday chose to make its pitch.
·The Paju AI Data Center, rising upon a 22,000-pyeong (72,727 square-meters) lot in Wollong-myeon, Gyeonggi, is the centerpiece of a strategy the carrier unveiled on-site to win 5 trillion won ($3.3 billion) in cumulative AI data center orders by 2030 and remake itself into what it calls an "AI Factory Operator." With a confirmed 200-megawatt power supply, it will be the only hyperscale-class facility of its size in the greater Seoul area, capable of powering the entire capital region's generative AI services at once.
