HD Hyundai said on the 8th that HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, the intermediate holding company for the shipbuilding institutional sector, will begin developing floating data center (FDC; Floating Data Center) technology.
An FDC is a data center that operates servers on a floating offshore structure, and HD Hyundai said FDCs are seen as an alternative that can solve the difficulty of securing sites for onshore data center construction and the server cooling expense.
According to HD Hyundai, on the previous day HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the global energy management corporations "Schneider Electric SE" for joint development of FDC infrastructure technology.
Schneider Electric SE is a corporations in the data center power, cooling and energy management fields, providing next-generation digital infrastructure solutions based on its experience building hyperscale data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
Under this agreement, the two companies plan to expand cooperation in core data center infrastructure technologies and engineering to optimize them for the offshore environment, with the goal of "integrated construction of data center infrastructure based on offshore platforms."
The two companies will review the infrastructure and technical requirements for implementing FDCs and jointly derive optimal infrastructure solutions suitable for offshore platform environments. They also said they plan to secure integrated design capabilities that combine data center power and cooling infrastructure with offshore platform technologies.
The two companies also agreed to share information on the latest FDC technology trends from time to time and to identify additional joint research and development opportunities to further expand their partnership.
Kim Hyung-kwan, CEO of HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, said, "HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering is accelerating the development of offshore data center technology based on its accumulated design and construction capabilities for floating structures in shipbuilding and offshore," adding, "Through this collaboration between the two companies, we will advance the core technologies that can reliably implement large-scale, high-density computing infrastructure at sea."