#South Korea #NVIDIA #Brookfield #Naver #Sejong

NAVER, Brookfield, and NVIDIA Collaborate for AI Growth

In a notable partnership, NAVER, Brookfield, and NVIDIA are set to transform Korea's AI landscape with a significant expansion of the country's sovereign AI factory infrastructure. Announced during a recent AI summit attended by Korean President Jae Myung Lee in San Francisco, this venture aims to increase the initial deployment of the NVIDIA Data Center On Demand (DSX) technology from 55 megawatts to a groundbreaking 200 megawatts.

This ambitious project, which will be centered at NAVER's GAK Sejong hyperscale data center in Sejong, South Korea, will provide robust production-scale computing resources for AI innovators both in Korea and the United States. With dedicated infrastructure, emerging AI companies will gain access to state-of-the-art computational power and environments necessary for developing next-generation AI models and applications.

Under the new agreements, Brookfield is poised to invest up to $9 billion as the exclusive capital partner, while NVIDIA will contribute $1 billion, and NAVER will cover the remaining costs to ensure the project's completion, bringing the total investment to $10 billion. This initiative builds upon NAVER's previous commitment in June to enhance its GAK Sejong data center with NVIDIA's DSX technology, paving the way for a long-term strategy aimed at achieving gigawatt-scale sovereign AI infrastructure to support Korea's enterprises, industries, governmental bodies, and global AI cloud services.

Haejin Lee, the Founder and Chairman of NAVER, remarked, "NVIDIA's strategic investment and our infrastructure supply agreement with Brookfield have propelled NAVER's vision for the AI Factory business into a robust execution phase. Leveraging the solid partnerships with our global allies, we will drive technological innovation, foster a sovereign AI ecosystem, and spearhead efforts to strengthen South Korea's AI competitiveness."

Key Features of the Expanded AI Factory

The newly expanded 200-megawatt AI factory will harness NVIDIA's Vera Rubin and Blackwell platforms, creating a dedicated resource pool tailored for emerging AI startups. This setup will facilitate the compute, software, and support essential for developing competitive AI models and applications on a large scale.

Further, this expansion enhances NAVER and NVIDIA's collaboration focused on open model development aimed at agentic and physical AI applications. With a commitment to innovation, NAVER is advancing its HyperCLOVA X models, which are set to incorporate NVIDIA's Nemotron™ 3 Ultra open models utilizing NAVER's proprietary data and training expertise.

Additionally, NAVER has become the first Korean company to join the NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition, contributing significantly to the open model development process that encompasses various phases from pre-training to reinforcement learning.

Plans are underway for NAVER to roll out an AI agent platform in Korea within the second half of the current year. This platform will leverage NVIDIA's Agent Toolkit software, which includes innovative components like NVIDIA NemoClaw™ blueprints. NAVER is also working on developing a Seoul World Model, utilizing its unique urban street-view and spatial modeling databases, structured around NVIDIA's Cosmos™ world foundation models.

About NAVER

Founded in 1999, NAVER has emerged as Korea's foremost internet enterprise and stands as one of the leading tech firms globally. Renowned for its pioneering technologies, NAVER operates the most popular search engine in Korea, alongside a diverse business portfolio that encompasses commerce, fintech, cloud solutions, AI, and robotics. In the fiscal year 2025, NAVER achieved impressive sales totaling KRW 12.04 trillion (approximately USD 8.18 billion). Team NAVER continues to broaden its market reach across Japan, North America, and Europe while pursuing relentless innovation through ongoing research and development initiatives focused on future technologies.