Building a megawatt of data centre now costs $11.3m, according to JLL figures published on 16 August. In 2025 it was $10.7m. In 2020 it was $7.7m — a rise of 47% in five years.
The number that travels
Cost per megawatt is the portable figure here, because it is denominated in capacity rather than in any one project. It is also the number that makes the rest of the sector legible: when the unit cost of capacity rises by nearly half while demand doubles, the binding constraint stops being demand and becomes the balance sheet.
The demand side, for scale
The same research expects global data centre power consumption to nearly double from around 103 GW in 2025 to 200 GW by 2030, with the market growing about 14% a year and requiring up to $3 trillion of infrastructure spending.
What Korea is actually committing
The Korean government has laid out 550 trillion won through 2029 to support 8.4 GW of AI data centres. The largest named project is GS E&C's Gangwon-Donghae campus at 2.4 GW total, whose 1.2 GW first phase is estimated at around 10 trillion won and is targeted to break ground in early October. Others are far smaller: SK and AWS in Ulsan at 103 MW, Gimpo at 80 MW, Ansan Sihwa at 40 MW, Bucheon at 9.8 MW.
Do not read this as an announcement
This is a survey of a construction sector, not a launch. The 8.4 GW is a government target, not contracted capacity, and the 2.4 GW campus has a groundbreaking date rather than an energised megawatt. Several listed projects sit at different stages, and only a few carry signed values. The hard, checkable fact is the cost curve.