Naver shares jumped more than 10% Monday, the kind of move the South Korean internet group has not seen in years, after it disclosed that NVIDIA would acquire $1 billion of newly issued stock. The transaction, announced with infrastructure partner Brookfield, converts Naver’s data center plans into a national project: a $10 billion buildout that NVIDIA’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, and Naver executives agreed to in Santa Clara the previous week, and that the companies presented as the foundation of Korea’s sovereign AI infrastructure.
The mechanics of the deal are precise. Naver will issue about 7.24 million new shares to NVIDIA at 204,500 won each, roughly a 1% discount to the market price, giving the chip maker a stake of about 4.5%. That makes NVIDIA Naver’s third-largest shareholder, behind the National Pension Service and BlackRock and ahead of founder Lee Hae-jin. Brookfield, the alternative asset manager with more than $1 trillion under management, has signed a nonbinding term sheet to provide up to $9 billion of financing, with Naver raising the remainder. NVIDIA’s payment is due by October 30, and Naver expects the Brookfield contract to close before then.
The money is aimed at a single site: the GAK Sejong hyperscale data center, which the companies plan to expand from 55 megawatts of capacity to 200 megawatts by 2028, with a long-term path to a gigawatt of sovereign AI infrastructure. The buildout will run on NVIDIA’s DSX platform, the AI factory product line the company introduced at its Taipei event in June, designed to produce tokens at the lowest possible cost per megawatt. The expansion was announced during Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s AI summit visit to San Francisco, a deliberate piece of staging that signaled the project’s national importance.
For Naver, the deal marks a change of identity. The company built its business as a consumer internet group, search advertising, commerce, content, webtoons, and its transformation into an AI infrastructure provider has been the strategy of Chief Executive Soo-yeon Choi since she took the top job. She has described the NVIDIA and Brookfield investments as the dividing line on the company’s path to becoming a global AI infrastructure player, and the share sale gives her the capital and the credibility to pursue that ambition. Naver’s HyperCLOVA X models are being rebuilt on NVIDIA’s Nemotron platform, and Naver became the first Korean company to join the Nemotron Coalition for open model development.
For NVIDIA, the investment is part of a broader strategic turn. The company has been shifting from selling chips to co-building the infrastructure those chips run on, and its balance sheet has become a tool in that campaign: it has invested roughly $30 billion in OpenAI and $10 billion in Anthropic, and the Naver stake extends the pattern to Asia. The investment also answers a competitive threat closer to home. Samsung and SK Hynix, the memory giants that sit at the center of Korea’s semiconductor industry, have been pushing their own AI chip ambitions, and a direct stake in Korea’s largest cloud and search company gives NVIDIA a channel into the country’s AI market that bypasses both.
The timing reflects the broader competition in Asian compute. Japan and Korea have been racing to build national AI infrastructure, each courting the same suppliers and the same sovereign AI customers. Korea’s government has made AI factories a national priority, and the Naver project is the biggest concrete expression of that policy so far. NVIDIA’s willingness to put equity behind the project, rather than simply sell the hardware, gives Korea a reason to anchor its buildout on NVIDIA platforms at a moment when the company faces questions about whether hyperscalers will keep buying at current levels.
Skeptics note the usual risks of infrastructure deals dressed as technology partnerships. The $10 billion project depends on Brookfield’s financing closing, on power availability at Sejong and on demand materializing from the sovereign AI customers Naver is courting across Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Naver’s cloud business remains small next to the global hyperscalers, and the company will be competing for the same government and enterprise workloads that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are chasing with their own sovereign offerings.
What is not in doubt is the direction. Chip makers that once sold boxes now take stakes in the buildings that house them, and NVIDIA’s balance sheet has become a strategic weapon in the race to own the next generation of AI infrastructure. The Naver deal is the clearest example yet of that strategy in Asia, and it raises the stakes for Samsung and SK Hynix, which now face a rival that owns a piece of Korea’s AI cloud. The $1 billion is a number the Korean market will be watching for years.
