Kakao Data Center Completed
Ensuring eco-friendliness, stability,
and efficiency

Kakao Data Center, the anchor tenant of the Campus Innovation Park

On September 26, Kakao held a completion ceremony for its first data center inside the ERICA Campus Innovation Park. The data center, which consists of two buildings – an operation building and a data processing building – can accommodate 4,000 rack shelves from the first basement floor to the sixth floor above ground. The new center can store up to 6EB (exabytes, equivalent to approximately 6.2 billion gigabytes) of data.

Kakao has four “leased” data centers in the metropolitan area, including Pangyo. However, in order to efficiently operate an IT company, it is essential to manage the entire system within its own data center. Moreover, in the rapidly growing IT industry, it is crucial to have the capacity to continuously expand the needs of service traffic. Thus, Kakao is also planning to expand its own Cloud business. Accordingly, Kakao planned to establish its own data center five years ago and selected ERICA as the site for data center construction in 2020. The Kakao Data Center is scheduled to begin full operation in January next year.

The Kakao Data Center is designed to withstand extreme natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods as well as fire. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which enables uninterrupted operation for 24 hours if/when there is an emergency, is equipped with a partition wall device, enabling operation even in the event of a fire. In addition, to thoroughly prepare for all emergencies, the center has doubled its major infrastructure including its power grids, air conditioning, and communications, and also utilizes eco-friendly fire-extinguishing gas and cooling water fire-suppression facilities throughout the data-processing building.

Going forward, Kakao plans to actively foster talent through youth IT training and tour programs at the data center. In addition, there will be active exchanges and cooperative activities between ERICA and Kakao, starting with the donation of ERICA industry-academia-research space (the AI Convergence Research Center) to Kakao. For its part, the Kakao Data Center has already kicked off the ERICA Campus Innovation Park Project worth a total of KRW 2.4 trillion. This new relationship looks very promising, and will undoubtedly add to ERICA’s industry-academia-research infrastructure, which is already flourishing, as well as opening to more possibilities in the future.