About 15 trillion won has been raised for a single climate fund. The figure is TPG's fundraising total, released on November 2, 2026. It has been described as the largest ever, and a surge in AI power demand is cited as the background. Whether that is a record for TPG internally or for the market as a whole has not been determined. In late October, an AI environmental responsibility pledge related to COP31 was released, and it listed disclosure of data centers' power and environmental impacts as a voluntary matter.
COP31 is the 31st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Disclosure refers to the process by which companies make business information available to outside parties. The moment AI power is cited as the background to a 15 trillion won fundraising, the issue moves beyond the tech industry's equipment concerns and becomes an item on the climate investment agenda, yet operators now get to choose whether to reveal how much electricity they use.
Talk of a congested power grid has also come from Google. Marsden Hanna, Google's head of climate policy, pointed to the U.S. power grid in early 2026 as the cause of the bottleneck for the company's data centers. A bottleneck is a phenomenon in which an entire flow slows down because it is blocked at its single narrowest point.
Annual outage time was presented as 2 hours in the United States and 9 minutes in South Korea. In a simple comparison, that is more than 13 times. Whether the indicator definitions and base years are the same remains to be examined. Having few outages only means that supply is rarely cut off, and it is hard to read as evidence that there is ample power to spare for new data centers.
In Masan, data center operator Samgong Percent Co., Ltd. ((주)삼공퍼센트) passed the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment's power grid impact assessment in February 2026. This is a review in which the government examines the effect of large-scale power facilities on the grid. The company also received a letter of intent from a big tech company to use the entire 80 MW of total power.
The name of the company has not been revealed. A letter of intent is a document stating an intention to use, so it is not a commitment that immediately guarantees electricity use.
The power grid impact assessment is a gateway reviewed by the government, and disclosure under the COP31 pledge is an option chosen by operators.
The difference in binding force carries over to verifying the effects of climate funding. If money bearing the name of climate flows toward AI power, it must be possible to determine whether that money actually reduced emissions. If disclosure is voluntary, verification reaches only as far as the operators that have disclosed.
It is also hard to compare those that have disclosed and those that have not by the same standard. Assessing the effect of the 15 trillion won from the outside becomes that much more difficult.
Even during a morning spent having AI summarize meeting minutes, servers at some data center are using electricity. In a country where outages are presented as 9 minutes a year, that electricity feels as though it will never be cut off. According to the wording of the COP31 pledge, whether users can look into the scale of the electricity used by data centers has been left to the operators' choice.
