LG Electronics now expects to clear its 2027 chiller revenue target of 1 trillion won ahead of schedule, according to BusinessKorea's coverage of the company's data center cooling push. Chiller orders in 2025 grew to three times the level of the prior year. The company is building two product lines in parallel: large chillers that circulate chilled water for heat rejection, and a coolant distribution unit aimed at direct-to-chip liquid cooling.
The chiller is LG's volume product today. These units function as ultra-large air conditioning systems, producing the chilled water loop that data centers use to reject heat from their cooling infrastructure. LG projects the addressable chiller market expanding from $1.6 billion in 2026 to $12.7 billion by 2030, a roughly eightfold move that tracks the rack-density curve operators are climbing as they pack in accelerators.
The tripling of orders signals where hyperscale capacity is being committed. Chillers remain the heat-rejection backbone even at sites moving to liquid cooling, because a CDU still has to dump captured chip heat into a facility water or chilled-water loop. That keeps LG's air-side and water-side products coupled to the same buildout, a dynamic familiar from the water-power tradeoff operators keep getting wrong.
The strategic bet is the coolant distribution unit. LG is pursuing certification for a 1.4 MW CDU that pairs a compact footprint with inverter-driven pumps and the company's own control and sensing stack. The unit feeds a direct-to-chip method, placing a cold plate with circulating coolant directly on the processor, which delivers better energy efficiency and space savings than circulating chilled air alone.
The certification matters because Nvidia's reference designs gate vendor access to hyperscale liquid-cooling orders. LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo discussed CDU certification cooperation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during Huang's visit to South Korea early in the month. LG says it is clearing customer approvals, certification, and vendor registration, with full-scale orders and revenue targeted to start this year. That positioning slots LG into the same gatekept race detailed in Nvidia's Rubin liquid-cooling mandate.
For cooling buyers, the read is that a major Korean OEM is entering a CDU field crowded with US and Japanese incumbents, backed by chiller-scale manufacturing and a direct line to Nvidia certification. If LG passes, it adds a second large-volume supplier to a supply chain where three frontrunners and a hundred chasers are fighting over the same direct-to-chip thermal architecture.