AI Data Center Boom Mints South Korea’s Newest Billionaire

The surging demand for electricity to fuel the AI boom has boosted shares of Sanil Electric, a little-known manufacturer of electrical transformers in South Korea, by about 110% since the Liberation Day selloff in April. The stock surge has made Park Dong-suk, the company’s founder and CEO, South Korea’s newest billionaire.

Park, 64, who owns 55% of Sanil Electric (with his wife, Kang Eun-sook), is worth an estimated $1.2 billion as of Friday’s stock market close.

Based in Ansan, a suburb of Seoul, Sanil Electric manufactures transformers, the vital equipment that changes voltage and makes electricity safe to use. The company reported that revenue rose 56% year-over-year to 334 billion won ($240 million) in 2024, while net income more than doubled from the previous year to 84 billion won.

Sanil Electric said in a quarterly filing in May that it expects electricity demand to continue to grow, as “information and communication technology becomes more advanced due to the spread of electric vehicles that use electricity as an energy source, AI that requires large-scale computing power for data learning, the Internet of Things that connects numerous electronic devices, and the exponential increase in demand for data centers due to the trend of all information being digitalized.” Citing data from Business Research Insights, Sanil Electric said in the filing the global transformer market is expected to grow to $48 billion in 2031 from $26 billion in 2021.

More than 60% of its revenue came from the U.S. In January, GE Vernova ordered more than $11.4 million worth of transformers from the company. “In the key U.S. market, investments in grid modernization are likely to continue, as the government is introducing a number of policies that should boost large-scale power demand,” Mirae Asset Securities Research analyst Yunju Cho said in a research note in March.

Cho added in the note that Sanil Electric is broadening its customer base in the U.S., securing contracts with companies such as California utility company PG&E and North Carolina-based power agency Duke Energy, in addition to existing customers GE Vernova and TMEIC (formerly called Toshiba Mitsubishi-Electric Industrial Systems). “One of the firm’s key strengths is its ability to flexibly meet the diverse technical requirements of large utilities companies (offering transformers in over 200 distinct design configurations),” she wrote. “We believe this capability positions the company for sustained order growth, driven by both new customer acquisitions and expanded orders from existing customers.”

Some of the biggest companies in the world have been aggressively expanding their data center footprints to power AI products. On Monday, Meta’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company is on track to be the first with a “supercluster” of data centers that houses more than a gigawatt of capacity, citing semiconductor research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis.

And Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, said in September that his AI company xAI completed the building of a massive data center facility in Memphis that houses 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips. “The artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months… Then, it was very easy to predict that the next shortage will be voltage step-down transformers,” Musk said last year at a conference. “You’ve got to feed the power to these things. If you’ve got 100-300 kilovolts coming out of a utility and it’s got to step down all the way to six volts, that’s a lot of stepping down.”

Park founded Sanil Electric in 1994 after working at Korean electrical equipment manufacturer Yuil Electric. He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Korea University in Seoul and a bachelor’s degree from Tech University of Korea in Siheung, just outside Seoul. He took his company public in July last year, raising 266 billion won.

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