  We study the production and equilibration of the gluon-minijet plasma
expected to be formed in the central region of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion
collisions at the BNL-RHIC and the CERN-LHC by solving a self-consistent
relativistic transport equation. We compute the minijet production within
perturbative QCD. Subsequent collisions among the semi-hard partons are treated
by considering the elastic gg -> gg processes with screening of the long
wavelength modes taken into account. We determine the time $\tau_{eq}$ where
close to ideal hydrodynamic flow sets in, and find rather similar numbers for
central heavy-ion collisions at BNL-RHIC and CERN-LHC energies. The number
densities, energy densities and temperatures of the minijet plasma are found to
be different at RHIC and LHC, e.g. $T(\tau_{eq})\sim220$ MeV and 380 MeV,
respectively.
