NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield plan to more than triple the capacity of a sovereign AI computing project at NAVER’s GAK Sejong hyperscale data center in Sejong, South Korea. The 200-megawatt NVIDIA DSX deployment is expected to use Vera Rubin and Blackwell computing platforms, with NAVER planning to expand the infrastructure to 1 gigawatt over time.
The initial 55-megawatt installation was announced in June. The facility would provide production-scale computing capacity to AI developers and companies in South Korea and the United States. Planned workloads include AI models, software agents and AI-based services.
NVIDIA plans to invest $1 billion in NAVER. Brookfield has signed a nonbinding term sheet to provide up to $9 billion in project financing. NAVER would fund the remaining costs and must secure at least $9 billion in committed financing for the project. The companies disclosed the expansion during South Korean President Jae Myung Lee’s AI Summit visit to San Francisco.
“NVIDIA’s planned strategic investment and our infrastructure supply agreement with Brookfield have propelled NAVER’s vision for the AI factory business into a robust execution phase,” said Haejin Lee, founder and chairman of NAVER. “Leveraging the solid partnerships with our global partners, we will drive technological innovation, foster a sovereign AI ecosystem and spearhead efforts to strengthen South Korea’s AI competitiveness.”
“The partnership will combine Brookfield’s global AI infrastructure investment capabilities, NAVER’s full-stack AI and data center operating expertise, and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to advance Korea’s AI capabilities,” said Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield. “As AI adoption accelerates across the global economy, access to trusted, sovereign and scalable AI infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important strategic priority for companies and countries.”
“AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to compete and innovate in the intelligence era,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield are building sovereign AI infrastructure at the scale needed to fuel Korea’s startups and industries. This is how nations and companies are building their futures in the age of AI.”
AI Factory Expansion at GAK Sejong
NAVER operates as an NVIDIA Cloud Partner and manages NVIDIA-based computing infrastructure at hyperscale. The longer-term deployment would serve Korean enterprises, industrial companies, government organizations and international AI cloud customers.
NVIDIA DSX Software Manages Compute Operations
The NVIDIA DSX architecture combines processors, computing systems, software, data center facilities and partner technologies. DSX MaxLPS software manages token throughput per megawatt. DSX OS handles lifecycle management, system health automation, resiliency and multi-tenant AI infrastructure operations.
NAVER Extends Open-Model Development
NAVER and NVIDIA are also working on open models for agentic and physical AI. NAVER plans to develop HyperCLOVA X models using NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra open models, proprietary data and its own training methods.
NAVER is the first South Korean company to join the NVIDIA Nemotron coalition. Its work will cover model pretraining, post-training and reinforcement learning.
The company plans to introduce an AI agent platform in South Korea during the second half of the year. The system will use NVIDIA Agent Toolkit software, including NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints.
NAVER is also developing a Seoul World Model using proprietary urban street-view and spatial modelling data. The project is based on NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models.
Source: NVIDIA
About NAVER
NAVER is a South Korean technology company that operates search, commerce, content, financial and cloud services. Founded in 1999, the company is headquartered in South Korea. It runs the Naver search portal, mobile apps, email, news, maps, blogs, online communities and advertising products. It also provides shopping, payments, cloud services, webcomics, translation tools, AI tools and business software. Its customers include consumers, advertisers, merchants, publishers, developers, financial service users, companies and public-sector organizations. NAVER serves retail, media, advertising, payments, software, entertainment, education and data center markets. Its subsidiaries include NAVER Cloud, NAVER Webtoon, NAVER Financial, NAVER Labs and Snow. The company also develops search, language, robotics, mapping and location technologies. NAVER has about 5,000 employees worldwide.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, designs and manufactures graphics processing units, systems on chips, networking hardware, and AI intelligence software such as CUDA. Its products serve industries including gaming, data centers, autonomous vehicles, professional visualization, robotics, health care, and energy. The company introduced the GPU in 1999 and later expanded into accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. In gaming, its GPUs support high-performance rendering, while in AI and high-performance computing, its systems provide the infrastructure for training and deploying large-scale models. NVIDIA also develops tools for robotics and autonomous driving.