Nvidia plans to inject more than US$1 billion into South Korea's Naver to jointly promote the construction of ultra-large artificial intelligence infrastructure
) will inject approximately US$1.01 billion into South Korean Internet giant Naver to deepen strategic cooperation between the two parties in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. At the same time, the two companies are advancing a joint project with the US private equity firm Brookfield with a total financing amount of up to US$9 billion, planning to build gigawatt (GW)-level artificial intelligence cloud data centers in South Korea and the United States to help the development of a new generation of artificial intelligence companies. According to regulatory documents filed by Naver on Monday, the company will issue 7.2 million new shares at a price of 204,500 won per share, with Nvidia as the single subscriber fully contributing approximately 1.481 trillion won (approximately US$1.01 billion). After the transaction is completed, Nvidia will hold approximately 4.5% of Naver's equity. In order to further enhance shareholder returns, Naver announced on the same day that it will cancel 1.017 trillion won worth of treasury shares in August. Boosted by this news, Naver's stock price rose 8.2% in early trading on Monday, narrowing the cumulative decline for the year to 7.4%. The funds raised this time will be used primarily to fund Naver’s artificial intelligence factory project and related computing infrastructure expansion. According to the cooperation plan, Bofeng has signed a non-binding letter of intent and plans to provide financing of up to US$9 billion for the data center project, with Naver filling the remaining funding requirements itself. The facility will be fully equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) provided by Nvidia. Its computing capacity is expected to reach 55 megawatts in the first half of 2027, expand to 100 megawatts by the end of the same year, and increase to 200 megawatts in 2028. It will eventually be upgraded to a gigawatt-level ultra-large artificial intelligence infrastructure. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed this tripartite cooperation. He pointed out that the three parties are collaborating to build a sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure of sufficient scale "with a view to providing impetus for the development of Korean start-ups and related industries." Sikander Rashid, Head of Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Business of BoFeng, emphasized that this cooperation aims to fully integrate BoFeng’s global investment experience, Naver’s data center capabilities and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to strengthen South Korea’s artificial intelligence ecosystem.