A Trillion Dollars Went Shopping for Power, and Korea Approved 1.9% of Requests

What a New $10 Billion Company Put on Its Shopping List

On June 11 the private equity firm KKR launched a new company called Helix Digital Infrastructure. It carries more than $10 billion in long duration capital, and it is run by Adam Selipsky, who used to be CEO of Amazon Web Services. The anchor investor list reads KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority, Nvidia, and the power producer Vistra.

The interesting part is not the name but the asset list. Hyperscale data center development and operations comes first. After that: baseload and flexible power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, fiber and connectivity. One company intends to own both the building where servers sit and the equipment that pushes electricity into it. Vistra’s generation portfolio is expected to approach 50,000 megawatts by the end of this year. Vistra CEO Jim Burke put the reason plainly, calling power generation and grid interconnections critical gating factors for AI infrastructure deployments.

Interconnection has been discussed mostly as a scheduling complaint: how long a large new load waits before a utility will connect it. Helix is what it looks like when a buyout firm treats that wait as an asset class instead.

Fewest Deals in Five Years, and a Trillion Dollars Spent

Samjong KPMG’s report on global PE trends counted $1 trillion of private equity investment in the first half of 2026 across 9,294 transactions. The deal count is the lowest in more than five years. Same money, fewer tickets, which means the average ticket got much larger. Technology, media and telecom took $354.7 billion; energy and natural resources took $149.2 billion. The largest deal of the half was the Helix launch itself.

For a founder buying compute, the consequence is a line item that used to be invisible. When capital moves from software equity into generators and land, whoever locked up the electricity has exactly one way to earn that back, which is to charge the tenant over a long term contract. Korean domestic PE, by contrast, shrank to $5.6 billion across 69 deals in the same period.

In Korea That Price Already Shows Up in the Rent

CBRE Korea published figures on July 12 that put a number on it. Through March 2026, applications for first stage technical review of grid impact for data centers in the Seoul capital region totaled 522 cases and 33,592 MW. Grid impact assessment is the process that decides whether a large electrical load may connect at all. Of those, 279 cases and 18,050 MW were rejected outright as unservable and 243 passed the first stage. Twenty four reached full review. Ten were finally approved, for 1,010 MW. That is 1.9% of applications and 3% of requested capacity.

So the sites that already have power attached get repriced. In the same report, capital region rent went from 140,000 won per kW in 2019 to 250,000 won in 2025, an increase of more than 70% in five years. A tenant drawing 100 kW went from about 14 million won a month to 25 million. Vacancy sits under 5%, and global cloud providers plus large domestic tech platforms hold 88% of demand. Everyone else competes for the remaining 12%.

What makes the Korean figures useful outside Korea is that the regulator publishes a pass rate at all. Scarcity that elsewhere gets described in queue years shows up here as a percentage and, one table over, as rent.

Read the Power Clause Before the Rate

When a colocation or GPU quote arrives, open the power terms before comparing headline rates. Whether the tariff passes utility increases through to you or holds fixed for the term decides what you actually spend two years out. In constrained markets this is currently the clause with the least negotiating room.

If someone pitches capacity coming online next year at a new site, ask which stage that project has cleared. Filed for first stage technical review, passed it, entered full review, and received final approval are four different answers. Out of 522 applications, 243 cleared the first stage and 10 got final approval. That gap is the distance between “in review” and “approved.”

What nobody has published yet is the next step. Whether the cost advantage of owning generation reaches the tenant price sheet, and by how much, is not written into any contract in public. The lease terms on the first campus built with its own power attached will be the first place to check.