Nvidia to Invest $1 Billion in Naver as Part of $10 Billion South Korea AI Infrastructure Expansion Push

Nvidia Corp. will invest $1 billion in South Korean internet giant Naver Corp. to help finance a major expansion of an artificial intelligence data center under construction in the country, the company announced late Friday, adding to a sweeping wave of investment deals from the world's most valuable company.

The funding is part of a broader $10 billion financing package that will allow Naver, one of South Korea's largest cloud service and internet portal operators, to more than triple the size of the facility it is building at its GAK Sejong hyperscale data center in Sejong, South Korea, expanding the site from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts of capacity by 2028. Under the terms of the agreement, Canadian asset manager Brookfield will serve as the project's exclusive capital partner, funding up to $9 billion through a nonbinding term sheet, while Nvidia contributes the $1 billion investment and Naver covers the remaining financing needed to complete the project.

A hub for both Korean and U.S. AI development

The expanded facility will run on Nvidia's artificial intelligence computing hardware, including its advanced Vera Rubin and Blackwell chip platforms, and is designed to give both Korean and U.S.-based AI developers access to production-scale computing power for building next-generation AI models, agents and services. The project will use Nvidia's DSX AI factory platform, and Naver has said it intends to eventually expand its deployment of Nvidia infrastructure to a full gigawatt of capacity, a dramatic scale-up from the facility's original footprint.

Naver founder and chairman Haejin Lee credited the new financing with accelerating the company's broader AI ambitions, saying Nvidia's investment and the infrastructure agreement with Brookfield had "propelled NAVER's vision for the AI factory business into a robust execution phase." The deal also deepens technical collaboration between the two companies, with Naver continuing development of its HyperCLOVA X AI models using Nvidia's Nemotron open-source models and joining the broader Nemotron Coalition, a group of companies working on open AI model development.

Nvidia said its planned investment remains subject to standard closing conditions, including Naver finalizing at least $9 billion in committed financing for the project separate from Nvidia's own contribution.

Part of a much larger Korea push

The Naver investment was announced alongside a separate, far larger commercial partnership between Nvidia and South Korea's SK Group, which the companies described as worth more than $500 billion in total business over time. That figure includes money Nvidia will spend purchasing memory chips from SK Hynix, currently the world's largest supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in AI systems, as well as purchases by SK Group of Nvidia's AI supercomputers.

Nvidia also said it will work directly with SK Hynix to help design future generations of high-bandwidth memory chips, an effort aimed at securing reliable access to a component that has remained in short supply amid the global buildout of AI data centers. Separately, SK Telecom is set to build more than 2 gigawatts of AI data centers across the Korean Peninsula, an amount of power roughly equivalent to what would be needed to supply 1.5 million homes. The first of these so-called AI factories built by SK Telecom is expected to open next year.

Speaking about the broader relationship with SK Group in an interview with Bloomberg Television, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang emphasized the scale of the partnership. "So between us, we're going to do half a trillion dollars' worth of business," Huang said, describing the depth of the commercial relationship between the two companies.

Timed to a high-profile diplomatic visit

Both the Naver and SK Group announcements coincided with a visit to Silicon Valley by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who traveled to San Francisco for an AI summit where the deals were formally unveiled. Huang, addressing the broader significance of Nvidia's expanding footprint in the country, described the current moment as a turning point for South Korea's technology sector. "This is the golden ages for Korea," Huang said, pointing to the country's semiconductor manufacturing strength and industrial base as key reasons behind Nvidia's continued investment there.

Additional technology agreements between Korean and American companies are reportedly still being finalized as part of the broader push tied to President Lee's visit, suggesting Friday's announcements may not be the last major deals to emerge from the trip.

Part of a year-long investment spree

The Korea-focused deals extend a pattern of aggressive dealmaking Nvidia has pursued over the past year as it works to secure both the chip supply chains and downstream infrastructure needed to support explosive global demand for AI computing power. Nvidia's relationship with South Korean technology companies has deepened steadily in recent months, following earlier chip supply agreements the company struck with Samsung, Hyundai and SK Group during a prior visit by Huang to the country, part of a broader effort to secure long-term partnerships across the region's semiconductor and industrial sectors.

South Korea has separately set a goal of deploying roughly 200,000 high-performance GPUs by 2030 as part of its national AI strategy, though the country continues to face infrastructure challenges tied to energy supply and data center cooling capacity as it works to scale up its AI computing footprint.

With Nvidia's $1 billion Naver investment still pending customary closing conditions, and Naver working to finalize the remaining $9 billion in project financing alongside Brookfield, the full scope of the Sejong data center expansion is not expected to be completed until 2028. In the meantime, the scale of Friday's announcements — spanning direct equity investment, chip supply agreements and multibillion-dollar infrastructure commitments — underscores how central South Korea has become to Nvidia's broader strategy for securing both chip manufacturing capacity and the physical infrastructure needed to keep pace with global AI demand.