Fire at Seoul data center forces 105 evacuations; operator unnamed

A fire thought to have begun in a transformer inside the uninterruptible power supply room of a data center in Seoul forced 105 people out of the building on Tuesday, September 29, and took just over three hours to extinguish. The Geumcheon Fire Department was called to the Gasan-dong area of Geumcheon-gu at 11:55 am, dispatched eighty officers and 14 engines, and had the blaze out by 3:13 pm; there were no casualties, and the cause remains under investigation.

The fire department has not named the building, but news footage appears to show STTGDC's Seoul 1, a 30MW, 40,000 sq m (430,556 sq ft) facility announced in 2021 and launched in July, which would place the fire roughly three months into the asset's operating life. Data Center Dynamics, which reported the incident, says it has contacted STTGDC for comment; the coverage does not identify the building's tenants or say whether it was serving customers when the fire started.

South Korea has a costly precedent for what a failure on the power side can destroy: a blaze at the government's National Information Resources Service data center in Daejeon a year earlier is thought to have lost 858TB of government information held on hard drives that had not been backed up anywhere else. A commercial colocation building is a different case, since customers are typically buying continuity through equipment failure, but the detail the coverage leaves open is what the fire did to the computing load the building was serving.

The UPS room is the unglamorous part of the asset, the transformer and related equipment standing between the utility feed and the server halls, and the fire department's account carries no damage estimate for the building. Which component failed, and whether anything else in that chain was affected, is what the inquiry will establish.

If the footage does point to Seoul 1, the fire arrives in the opening months of a 30MW building that came online in July. Data center capital now prices the anchor tenant rather than the megawatt, and a facility three months into service has almost no operating record against which that pricing can be tested, with a tenant roster that is not yet public.

The operator's identity and the inquiry's finding on the transformer are the two facts the coverage does not yet supply.