LS Electric and GS Engineering & Construction signed a memorandum of understanding to develop direct current power distribution for AI data centers, according to TheElec's coverage by EunGyu Kim. LS Electric brings switchboards, gas-insulated switchgear, and extra-high-voltage transformers, plus a next-generation line it is still developing: solid-state transformers, solid-state circuit breakers, and energy storage. The company already runs a production facility in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, entirely on a DC distribution system, which makes the pitch a reference rather than a concept.
Every rectification and inversion stage between the utility feed and the die carries a conversion loss, and that loss leaves as heat inside the building envelope. Utility AC steps down through a transformer, passes a UPS that in double conversion rectifies and inverts again, reaches a power supply unit that rectifies once more, then hits the point-of-load converters on the board. Cut stages out of that chain and two things happen at once: the facility draws fewer kilowatts for the same compute, and the mechanical system stops paying to remove the difference. Nobody bills the cooling plant for switchgear losses, which is precisely why they get left out of the business case.
The rack side of the industry is already moving. The 800 volt DC architecture NVIDIA has been pushing for its next platform generation exists because copper losses and busbar mass stop being tolerable somewhere north of 100kW a rack, and Rubin ships with liquid cooling as the assumption rather than the option. A facility-side DC distribution program that meets that rack architecture halfway removes conversion hardware from both ends. Korea is building toward 18 gigawatts of announced data center capacity with a water problem attached, and the Japanese vendors are running the same play from the liquid cooling side with Fuji Electric, Nidec, Daikin, and NTT.
The MOU has no capacity figure, no delivery date, and no efficiency claim attached, which is the standard shape of a Korean industrial partnership announcement at this stage. The number to ask for when it firms up is the one nobody publishes: end-to-end efficiency from the medium-voltage feed to the board, measured on a hot day at full load, against the same measurement on the AC baseline. Anything above two or three points of difference shows up as chiller tonnage a designer no longer has to buy. Operators specifying halls for 2028 should be asking their electrical engineer for that comparison now, because the mechanical sizing gets locked well before the switchgear order goes out.