Electricity pylons and power lines.<\/p>\n
Carla Gottgens\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n
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\u2019s founder and CEO, South Korea\u2019s newest billionaire.<\/p>\n
Park, 64, who owns 55% of Sanil Electric (with his wife, Kang Eun-sook), is worth an estimated $1.2 billion as of Friday\u2019s stock market close.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sanil Electric said in a quarterly filing<\/a> in May that it expects electricity demand to continue to grow, as \u201cinformation 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Transformers and power transmission lines are seen in a power distribution yard in Des Plaines, Illinois.<\/p>\n Tim Boyle\/Getty Images<\/p>\n More than 60% of its revenue came from the U.S. In January, GE Vernova ordered<\/a> more than $11.4 million worth of transformers from the company. \u201cIn 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,\u201d Mirae Asset Securities Research analyst Yunju Cho said in a research note<\/a> in March.<\/p>\n 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). \u201cOne of the firm\u2019s key strengths is its ability to flexibly meet the diverse technical requirements of large utilities companies (offering transformers in over 200 distinct design configurations),\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe believe this capability positions the company for sustained order growth, driven by both new customer acquisitions and expanded orders from existing customers.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the biggest companies in the world have been aggressively expanding their data center footprints to power AI products. On Monday, Meta\u2019s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg said<\/a> that his company is on track to be the first with a \u201csupercluster\u201d of data centers that houses more than a gigawatt of capacity, citing semiconductor research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis.<\/p>\n And Elon Musk, the richest<\/a> man in the world, said<\/a> 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. \u201cThe artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months\u2026 Then, it was very easy to predict that the next shortage will be voltage step-down transformers,\u201d Musk said<\/a> last year at a conference. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to feed the power to these things. If you\u2019ve got 100-300 kilovolts coming out of a utility and it\u2019s got to step down all the way to six volts, that\u2019s a lot of stepping down.\u201d<\/p>\n Park founded Sanil Electric in 1994 after working at Korean electrical equipment manufacturer Yuil Electric. He earned a master\u2019s degree in electrical engineering at Korea University in Seoul and a bachelor\u2019s degree from Tech University of Korea in Siheung, just outside Seoul. He took his company public in July last year, raising 266 billion won.<\/p>\n More from Forbes<\/p>\n ForbesSouth Korea\u2019s AI Chip Champion Is Poised To Carve Out Global NicheBy John Kang<\/a>ForbesMaker Of Popular Skin Booster Shot Rejuran Becomes Billionaire On K-Beauty BoomBy John Kang<\/a>ForbesFounder Of Korean Gaming Company Becomes Billionaire As Shares Surge On ListingBy John Kang<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Electricity pylons and power lines. Carla Gottgens\/Bloomberg The surging demand for electricity to fuel the AI boom has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,9659,17689,181,507,17693,17685,17687,17686,17690,17688,17692,17691,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-19119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-data-center","10":"tag-amd-data-center","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-china-data-center","14":"tag-data-center","15":"tag-korea-ai-data-center","16":"tag-korea-data-center","17":"tag-meta-data-center","18":"tag-nvidia-data-center","19":"tag-openai-data-center","20":"tag-oracle-data-center","21":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}