Lee Hae-jin, founder and board chairman of Naver, officially announced that the company has attracted a $10 billion (about 14.6 trillion won) investment from Nvidia and global alternative asset manager Brookfield. Based on this, Naver plans to accelerate the construction of an "AI Factory" of up to 1 gigawatt (GW) in scale, while also actively expanding a "sovereign AI" ecosystem that is not dependent on any particular country or company.
Attending an artificial intelligence (AI) summit held in San Francisco on the 24th, Lee said, "This time, Nvidia and Brookfield have invested a large sum of $10 billion in us." He added, "It will serve as an opportunity for Naver to make a very big change and leap to a new stage."
Lee expected the investment to become a turning point that goes beyond simple financing to expand the AI infrastructure business to a global level. "Beyond capital, it will be a great opportunity to scale up Naver's data center operation know-how even faster through the global brands and networks the two companies possess," he stressed.
The industry views the investment as playing a key funding role in the ultra-large AI Factory construction project Naver is pursuing. Earlier this week, Lee and Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon visited Brookfield's headquarters in Toronto, Canada, to discuss AI infrastructure investment and financing plans.
Brookfield is a global alternative asset manager with a history of more than 120 years and assets under management (AUM) exceeding $1 trillion. Its core business is large-scale real asset investment in infrastructure, energy, real estate, and data centers.
An AI Factory is a facility that integrates AI models and cloud technology on top of a physical foundation of graphics processing unit (GPU) servers, data centers, and power and cooling equipment to provide large-scale computing capacity, requiring substantial investment funds.
Last month, Naver and Nvidia agreed to jointly build a gigawatt (GW)-class ultra-large global AI Factory. The plan is to build "sovereign AI" infrastructure in countries around the world based on Nvidia's AI Factory optimization platform, the "DSX Architecture." Together with Nvidia, Naver will first operate a 55-megawatt (MW) AI Factory at its Sejong data center "Gak Sejong" in the first half of 2027, then expand in stages to 200MW in 2028 and eventually up to 1GW over the long term.
On the same day, Lee also presented Naver's vision for "sovereign AI" alongside the AI infrastructure investment. "The internet world Naver dreams of is not a world where the internet and AI are dominated by a few countries or companies," he said. "For the world's diversity to be maintained, each country, region, and company must be able to create and operate its own AI." He stressed, "With this investment as a catalyst, Naver will continue further technology research and investment. We will do our best to create an environment where diverse AI ecosystems coexist by cooperating with companies around the world that share the same vision."
