Naver said on July 27 it secured a $1 billion strategic investment from Nvidia and signed a $9 billion infrastructure pre-agreement with global alternative investment firm Brookfield.

Through the agreements, Naver said it has secured $10 billion in global funding and partnerships. It aims to address at the same time the supply of graphics processing units (GPUs) and equipment procurement, key prerequisites in global artificial intelligence (AI) competition, and to take the lead in the global AI infrastructure market.

Nvidia's investment is a tangible follow-up measure to the "gigawatt (GW)-class ultra-large global AI factory construction agreement" the two companies announced in June. It is the first time in 22 years that Naver has carried out a third-party allocation paid-in capital increase, and the first since it moved its listing to the KOSPI in 2008.

Nvidia will invest $1 billion, about 1.48 trillion won, to acquire a 4.5% stake in Naver, or 7,241,564 common shares. The payment deadline is Oct. 30. Separately, Naver said in a regulatory filing that its board on July 24 decided to cancel about 4.9 million treasury shares, worth about 1.0 trillion won, on Aug. 3 to enhance shareholder value.

Naver also selected Brookfield, which manages more than $1 trillion, as its exclusive preferred negotiation partner and signed a $9 billion infrastructure pre-agreement. It said this created a basis for securing in a stable way the latest GPUs and data centres needed to operate an AI factory with capacity of hundreds of megawatts (MW). Its subsidiary Naver Cloud is also in positive discussions with Nvidia on an "AI compute partnership" agreement to jointly push the global AI factory business.

Nvidia's unusual move to make a direct equity investment reflects Naver's full-stack AI capabilities. Naver is one of the rare companies globally that has directly operated the entire AI factory domain, from data centres and GPU clusters to AI platforms and its own models and services. It commercialised Nvidia's supercomputing infrastructure for the first time in the world in 2019 and internalised key data-centre technologies such as cooling, power and networks based on experience accumulated over about 20 years.

Naver currently operates GPU colocation space at about 20 locations nationwide in addition to its own data centres. It aims to cut the time from securing resources to launching services to within 1 month by building a standard server system. It operates a cluster of about 100,000 GPUs, the largest scale in South Korea, and has automated systems for resource management and recovery. It has been assessed as having proven capabilities to lead a sovereign AI business as the only provider of large-scale GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) in South Korea.

Based on the partnership, Naver plans to generate revenue from the AI factory business starting in 2027. It aims to begin operating a 55 MW global AI factory in the first half of 2027, expand to 200 MW in 2028 and then rapidly scale up to the gigawatt class. It aims to absorb demand for sovereign AI infrastructure in Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

On July 24 (local time), a signing ceremony for the strategic investment agreement was held at Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin (이해진), Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon (최수연) and Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang attended.

Choi said the investments by Nvidia and Brookfield would be an important turning point for Naver's future growth. She said it was encouraging that the investment would provide momentum for Naver to quickly enter the global AI infrastructure market through its technology and infrastructure. She added that Naver would also swiftly wrap up efforts to attract AI factory customers and use it as a turning point to become a major company in the global AI infrastructure field.

On the day of the signing, Lee, who attended the "San Francisco K-AI" summit held in San Francisco, said Naver would actively cooperate with companies around the world to build an AI ecosystem in which the diversity of countries and groups is respected. He said Naver had secured investments from Nvidia and Brookfield, creating an opportunity to scale up its accumulated data-centre operation technologies and know-how on a global stage.