Korea – Samsung Electronics and five affiliates will invest a combined US$ 1 billion in Helix Digital Infrastructure, an AI infrastructure company established by investment firm KKR, the group announced on 29 September.
Samsung Electronics will contribute US$ 500 million. Samsung C&T, Samsung SDS, Samsung SDI, Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance will provide the remainder.
The Samsung group joins KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA), NVIDIA, and US power company Vistra as a founding investor in Helix.
Launched in June 2026, Helix is designed to deliver integrated infrastructure across the AI value chain, according to the announcement. Its scope spans hyperscale data centre development and operations, baseload and flexible power generation, transmission and distribution, and fibre-optic networks.
The company says this approach will help hyperscalers secure large-scale infrastructure quickly as AI demand grows.
Adam Selipsky leads Helix and is assembling a management team of data centre and power industry specialists. The company also draws on KKR’s global infrastructure business, which has about 170 dedicated professionals.
The investment comes as AI data centres move beyond simple facility assets. According to the announcement, they now support business models such as GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), sovereign AI and colocation.
Power, however, remains the central constraint. Helix identifies electricity availability as the greatest bottleneck in AI infrastructure and plans to secure energy capacity through direct investments and partnerships with major energy developers, including Vistra.
For Samsung, the deal signals a wider ambition. The company says it expects to expand from a traditional hardware component supplier into an active architect of the global AI infrastructure ecosystem.
To support that goal, Samsung points to capabilities across several of its affiliates. Its Device Solutions (DS) Division supplies semiconductor solutions for the global build-out.
Meanwhile, the Device eXperience (DX) Division offers data centre cooling products, from air cooling systems to coolant distribution units (CDUs) for liquid cooling. It sells them through FläktGroup, its data centre HVAC subsidiary acquired in 2025, and operates 14 production sites worldwide and a service network across 65 countries.
On the construction side, Samsung C&T’s Engineering & Construction Group works as an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor on data centre and power generation projects.
Samsung SDS, an IT solutions provider, designs, builds and operates data centres, and has recently entered the GPUaaS business. The company says it has the lowest power usage effectiveness (PUE) level in Korea, applied to its own facilities and the Korea AI Computing Centre (KOACC).
Samsung SDI, for its part, supplies uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and battery backup unit (BBU) technology for data centres that run high-performance servers around the clock. It plans to explore new opportunities in ultra-high-output, high-capacity batteries.
Through the investment, Samsung Electronics and its affiliates aim to accelerate global AI data centre deployment alongside Helix.
