Team NAVER sought to expand business cooperation in artificial intelligence with major French companies and institutions during President Lee Jae-myung's visit to France.
NAVER CEO Choi Soo-yeon and NAVER Cloud CEO Kim You-won met with chief executives of leading French firms in media, information technology, energy, mobility and finance during the trip to discuss new opportunities centered on AI infrastructure, industry-specific AI and content.
In opening remarks at a Korea-France business roundtable held on the 8th, Choi stressed the need to expand cooperation in three areas: global AI infrastructure, industry-specific AI built on data sovereignty and security, and cultural content.
Choi cited NAVER's recent announcement of plans with Nvidia and Brookfield to build a global AI factory with capacity of more than one gigawatt, and raised the possibility of AI infrastructure cooperation with France. "We want to combine France's stable energy base with NAVER's experience in the AI ecosystem to build an AI factory together that European companies and startups can use," she said.
Choi pointed to the Bank of Korea's finance-focused AI model BOKI and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power's nuclear plant AI model Hy-NuRI as examples of the company's experience applying AI to actual operations by combining it with industry data and expertise. On that basis, she proposed working with French companies and institutions to build industry-specific AI systems that secure data sovereignty and security.
She also highlighted the performance of NAVER WEBTOON, which has released more than 70 original titles in France and drawn more than 2 million readers. "Based on our global webtoon platform and technological capabilities such as our copyright protection AI Toon Radar, we want to work together so that titles created jointly by creators in both countries can reach readers worldwide," she said.
A day earlier, on the 7th, Choi appeared as a speaker at the Lumière Summit, an international film and video summit held in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France.
She introduced the IP Adaptation Fund, a $100 million global content fund jointly created by NAVER and Webtoon Entertainment to support creators' global growth. The plan is to expand direct investment so that intellectual property from creators of webtoons and other works can extend into video, animation and games and grow into global franchises.
NAVER also signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with France's Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) during the presidential visit to combine AI technology with audiovisual cultural heritage archives. The two sides plan to apply NAVER's AI technology to INA's extensive audiovisual archives to analyze and organize content more efficiently, and to jointly explore ways for users to search and use the materials they need with ease.
