Nvidia recently announced an investment of about $1 billion in the South Korean internet giant Naver, and the two sides will work together to promote the construction of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in South Korea. Following the news, Naver’s stock price surged more than 10% during Monday’s trading session on July 27th.
According to Reuters, Naver stated in a regulatory filing that it will issue 7.2 million new shares to Nvidia at a price of 204,500 Korean won per share (approximately a 1% discount from the previous closing price), raising approximately $1 billion for the expansion of AI data centers.
After the transaction is completed, Nvidia will hold about 4.5% of Naver’s shares, becoming one of its major shareholders.
Founded in 1999, Naver is South Korea’s largest internet company, with businesses covering search, e-commerce, financial technology, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
According to the latest public data, the National Pension Service of Korea is Naver’s largest shareholder, holding 9.25% of the shares; BlackRock Fund Advisors holds 6.12%, ranking second.
Under the newly announced collaboration plan, Naver will join forces with Nvidia and asset management company Brookfield to jointly expand the GAK AI data center in Sejong City, South Korea.
The three companies announced last Friday that Nvidia will invest $1 billion to subscribe to new shares, while Brookfield will provide up to $9 billion in financing as a project capital partner, jointly supporting a national AI factory infrastructure construction plan with a total investment scale of up to $10 billion.
The expanded data center will utilize Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin and Blackwell AI platforms, with the AI computing deployment capacity expected to increase to 200 megawatts (MW) by 2028.
In June of this year, the two parties announced the establishment of a global AI infrastructure partnership to promote AI infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific, European, and Middle Eastern markets to meet the demand for “Sovereign AI” development in various countries.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed that the long-term vision of both parties is to build gigawatt (GW) level AI infrastructure. If the related plans are successfully implemented, Naver’s overall AI business scale is expected to expand tenfold in the future.
Naver pointed out that 1 gigawatt computing capacity is approximately four times the maximum capacity of the current GAK Sejong data center, capable of simultaneously deploying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s latest GPUs, providing powerful computing power for large-scale model training and AI inference.
In recent years, Jensen Huang has been advocating the concept of “Sovereign AI,” advocating for countries to establish and control their own AI infrastructure to safeguard data security, language and culture, and key technological autonomy, rather than relying entirely on overseas cloud service providers. It is widely believed that this strategy will also help Nvidia expand its customer base from U.S. tech giants to governments and local tech companies worldwide.
Nvidia has been increasing its investments in the AI field in recent years, actively participating in investments and collaborations with generative AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while also laying out global AI infrastructure construction, further solidifying its core position in the global AI industry chain.