SK Ecoplant opens US recycling plant for data center servers

SK Ecoplant Co., a South Korean construction engineering and waste management firm, said on Thursday it launched a recycling plant for data center servers in the US to expand its presence in the global information technology asset disposition (ITAD) market.

SK TES, the South Korean company’s electronic waste recycling subsidiary based in Singapore, on Wednesday opened an ITAD facility dedicated to data centers in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which can process up to 600,000 individual servers a year. SK TES, formerly TES Envirocorp Pte., plans to wipe out data stored on data centers’ hard disks or memory chips and reuse and recycle them in the plant.

The ITAD is a service to collect unwanted or broken IT devices such as smartphones, laptops, PCs and servers, eliminate stored data on the devices and support their reuse or recycling. Those devices are sold as refurbished products after repairs and inspection, or for parts and materials after disassembling.

“We aim to dominate North America, which makes up 40% of the global data center ITAD market, through synergy between the new Virginia ITAD center and the Las Vegas facility that opened last year,” said Cho Jae Yeon, head of SK Ecoplant’s environment business unit.

“We will lead the global ITAD market based on capabilities including perfect information security technology and international standardization certificates related to safety.”

Virginia is home to one of the world’s largest data center clusters, where global Big Tech companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. are operating such facilities.

TO RAISE CAPACITY TO 1 MILLION SERVERS

SK TES acquired by SK Ecoplant in 2022 targets not only existing tech companies such as major cloud, platform and Internet of Things names but also financial firms, which also prioritize on data security.

SK TES, which currently has 46 bases in 23 countries including five in the US, plans to build more ITAD facilities dedicated to data centers in various nations such as Singapore and Australia by 2026 to expand its processing capacity to 1 million servers.

The global ITAD market was forecast to more than double to $31.4 billion by 2032 from $14.5 billion in 2022, according to industry tracker Global Market Insights Inc.

Gartner Inc., a global technological research and consulting firm, selected SK TES as the largest of only three ITAD providers with the ability to deliver such services globally. The other two ITAD providers are Iron Mountain Inc. of the US and Australia’s Sims Lifecycle Services.

Write to In-Hyeok Lee at twopeople@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.