Korea's APR-1400 Reactors Head to U.S. Market in Two-Unit Plan

* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items for each reader type.

1. Entering the 2,000 Trillion Won U.S. Nuclear Market: Initial Investment Funds to Pre-Order Korean Equipment

- Key points: The government reported to a full meeting of the National Assembly's Trade, Industry, Energy, SMEs and Startups Committee that it is in talks with the U.S. side on a nuclear framework under which two of eight large reactors in the United States would be built as Korean-designed APR-1400 units. Korean nuclear exports to the United States had been blocked by a confidential agreement signed last year between KEPCO (015760), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and Westinghouse. Under the agreement, each overseas unit carried $650 million in goods and services purchase contracts and $175 million in technology licensing fees, and exports to Europe were also restricted. The two countries agreed not to apply these restrictions to nuclear construction linked to U.S. investment. As President Donald Trump moves to add 300 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, quadrupling installed capacity, the United States is emerging as the world's largest nuclear market. At a construction cost of $5,000 per kilowatt, the market would be worth $1.5 trillion, or about 2,040 trillion won. Of the total $120 billion project cost, $20 billion has been set aside as a contingency for cost overruns, providing a safeguard against construction cost increases, while $10 billion of the initial investment funds will be used to order nuclear equipment, opening the possibility of orders flowing to Korean companies.

2. [Exclusive] Google Challenges Nvidia's GPU Monopoly as Korea Becomes Big Tech AI Infrastructure Battleground

- Key points: Competition among Big Tech firms over Korea's AI ecosystem is intensifying after Google changed its tensor processing unit strategy this year and officially announced it would supply TPUs to external data centers outside the Google Cloud Platform. TPUs are AI chips, or ASICs, specialized for specific computations and offer higher power efficiency than general-purpose graphics processing units. The latest TPU v8 delivers roughly three times the training performance per unit of power consumption compared with its predecessor. Anthropic has decided to expand its TPU deployment from 1 gigawatt this year to 5 gigawatts next year, and Morgan Stanley projected Google's direct TPU sales would reach $84 billion, or about 116 trillion won, in 2027. Meanwhile, with Google joining Nvidia and AMD, which had already signaled plans to establish AI research centers in Korea, expectations are also growing for expanded cooperation between Google and Korean companies such as Kakao (035720) and the LG (003550) AI Research Institute.

3. 8.4 Trillion Won for Next-Generation Batteries: Sodium and Solid-State to Counter China

- Key points: The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy announced a battery industry technology roadmap on the 22nd, saying 8.4 trillion won would be invested in sodium-ion and solid-state batteries, with the three battery makers LG Energy Solution (373220), Samsung SDI (006400) and SK On, along with materials companies, in attendance. Under the structure, the government will create about 400 billion won in research and development programs from 2027 to 2031, while the private sector invests about 8 trillion won in R&D and facilities by 2030. For sodium-ion batteries, the target is commercialization of 220 watt-hour-per-kilogram cells by 2030, while solid-state batteries are targeted for prototypes in 2027 and full commercialization in 2030. Behind the strategic shift is the widening gap with China. Korean battery makers' European market share fell to 35% in 2025 from 55% in 2023, while Chinese companies' share jumped to 61% from 42%. The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade also forecast that global demand for energy storage systems would grow at an average annual rate of 19%, from 185 gigawatt-hours in 2023 to 1,449 gigawatt-hours in 2035, and that batteries for uninterruptible power supply systems at AI data centers would grow 40% a year on average.

4. Koo Kwang-mo, Nadella Forge AI Alliance: One LG Technology to Be Embedded in Microsoft Data Centers

- Key points: LG has signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft for comprehensive collaboration across the AI industry, accelerating its transformation into an AI infrastructure company. LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo held a top management meeting on the 21st local time at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, attended by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, with core executives including LG Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman Kwon Bong-seok and LG Electronics (066570) CEO Ryu Jae-cheol all taking part. The core of the cooperation is to bundle LG Electronics' high-capacity cooling technology, LG Energy Solution's battery and power solutions, LG CNS's data center design and operations capabilities, and LG Uplus's (032640) network technology into a single package to participate in Microsoft's global AI data center expansion. LG also plans to introduce Microsoft's AI and cloud platforms, including Copilot, across its office workforce, and over the medium to long term to broaden cooperation to prefabricated data centers, in which equipment is manufactured in advance at factories and assembled on site.

5. U.S. Data Center Backlash Hits Wall Street as IPOs Stall One After Another

- Key points: With opposition to data center construction growing in the United States ahead of November midterm elections, initial public offerings by related companies are being delayed or halted one after another, The New York Times reported on the 21st local time. SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japan's SoftBank that has been pursuing the world's largest data center project in Ohio, pushed back an IPO planned for this month to mid-October or later, after investors questioned its target valuation of more than $50 billion, or about 68 trillion won. SB Energy has data center capacity of 8.8 gigawatts either under contract or under construction, but has yet to bring a single site into operation. Holtec, which builds small modular reactors, has indefinitely suspended its IPO plans, and power company Aggreko has delayed its listing. Meanwhile, caution over data center investment is growing as astronomical capital spending burdens combine with arguments for slowing the pace of AI development.

6. [Exclusive] Musinsa Converts All RCPS to Common Shares, Clearing Financial Risk Ahead of IPO

- Key points: Musinsa, which is targeting a listing in the first half of next year, has been confirmed to have converted all of its previously issued redeemable convertible preferred shares into common shares. Musinsa raised more than 560 billion won by issuing three types of RCPS on six occasions between 2019 and 2023. With the conversion, 39.31 million preferred shares as of the end of last year became 39.34 million common shares, making all 204.63 million shares outstanding common shares. After the adoption of Korean International Financial Reporting Standards, RCPS were classified as financial liabilities, and related liabilities reached 849.9 billion won as of the end of the second quarter this year, pushing the debt ratio as high as 812%. The industry expects it to fall to 130% to 140% after the conversion. Interest expenses and derivative valuation gains and losses that arose while holding RCPS will also disappear, reducing the burden of future earnings volatility. Musinsa's consolidated net loss of 15.6 billion won in the first half of this year is also understood to have been substantially affected by RCPS-related accounting treatment.