Two companies of South Korea's LS Group disclosed orders from Bloom Energy on Tuesday 13 October, both for the power side of American AI data centers. LS Electric will supply 38 kV high-voltage switchgear and distribution transformers worth 185.3 billion won, about $138.7 million, for a fuel cell power plant at a data center a major U.S. technology company is building in Pennsylvania. LS Materials will deliver ultracapacitors worth about 69 billion won, or $51.5 million, for Bloom's solid oxide fuel cell systems in AI data centers. Neither the data center operator nor the site is named.
The Switchgear Order
LS Electric supplies the switchgear and the transformers as one package, BusinessKorea reports, with deliveries staggered from April to July 2027. The fuel cells generate on site, and the 38 kV equipment is what collects their output and distributes it to the data center buildings. The order lifts LS Electric's business with Bloom to more than $500 million since April 2025, according to the Korea Times. The company has a plant in Utah and a campus in Bastrop, Texas, for sales and service in North America.
Why A Fuel Cell Plant Needs Capacitors
The smaller of the two orders says more about how AI loads behave. A GPU cluster does not draw a steady current: its demand can swing sharply within moments as training jobs start, stop and synchronise. Fuel cells answer such swings slowly. LS Materials' ultracapacitors charge and discharge large amounts of power in a very short time and are meant to take up those swings so that the fuel cell output stays stable, as The Elec and BusinessKorea describe the application.
The contract runs from April 2027 to March 2028 and goes through iConnexion Asia, LS Materials' distributor in Singapore. It is about 2.4 times LS Materials' standalone revenue of 29 billion won in 2025, and follows a first order of 6.3 billion won from the same customer in July. Further contracts are under negotiation; the company expects the total to pass $100 million if they are signed before the end of 2026. Until now its ultracapacitors went mainly into wind turbines, automated guided vehicles and UPS systems; this is its first business with AI data centers.
Same Problem, Other Prime Movers
The load swing is not a fuel cell problem alone. Gas engines and turbines that run a campus in island mode see the same steps, and every on-site plant has to be told how fast and how far the IT load can move before its control system, its storage and its auxiliaries are sized. That question now belongs in the first meeting on an AI data center power plant, next to the usual ones on redundancy and site conditions.
The delivery dates are worth a look too. Switchgear in spring 2027 and capacitors from April 2027 point to a plant energised in the second half of that year; as with the gas supply on other sites, the electrical equipment has become a line on the critical path, not a catalogue item.
Sources: The Korea Times, BusinessKorea (LS Electric), BusinessKorea (LS Materials), The Elec, Seoul Economic Daily
