Lotte Innovate accelerates data center push with domestic, overseas partnerships

Lotte Innovate is stepping up its data center operations at home while expanding partnerships to enter overseas markets.

The company said Friday it signed an MOU with IT infrastructure firm ITCEN CTS to support stable operations at the Ansan Global Cloud Center (GCC) and to pursue broader data center business cooperation.

The Ansan GCC is a roughly 40-megawatt data center under development in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, with completion scheduled for 2027. Lotte Innovate had earlier signed a five-year outsourced management contract with IGIS Asset Management to oversee the facility's overall operations.

Under the agreement, ITCEN CTS will provide specialized operations personnel and IT infrastructure technology. The two companies also plan to explore cooperation in hyperscale and edge data centers and to jointly pursue new business opportunities through combined sales and marketing efforts.

Lotte Innovate is also strengthening its overseas push. On Tuesday, the company signed a strategic MOU with CMC Group, a major Vietnamese IT firm. The partnership aims to combine Lotte Innovate's domestic design, build and operate (DBO) expertise with CMC Group's local business presence to identify new opportunities in Vietnam's hyperscale data center market.

Domestic data center contracts have continued to accumulate. After securing an outsourced management deal for the Cam Square data center in December last year, the company won an edge data center DBO contract from IGIS Asset Management in February this year. The Ansan GCC operating contract, signed recently, marks a further expansion of its business footprint.

"Data centers are a critical infrastructure sector growing in importance as AI and cloud adoption accelerates," a Lotte Innovate official said. "We will expand our global partnerships on the strength of the business experience and operational capabilities we have built domestically, and develop our data center business into a medium- to long-term growth engine."

Meanwhile, Lotte Innovate has set a target of raising its DBO business to 30 percent of total company sales by 2028. As of September, the company's cumulative data center contract value stood at about 130 billion won ($97.1 million), with managed capacity reaching 110 megawatts. Going forward, it plans to expand DBO and outsourced management services for external customers and broaden its scope from edge data centers to AI and hyperscale facilities.