SEOUL \u2014 Shares of South Korean internet and cloud service giant Naver jumped more than 10 per cent on Monday (July 27) after it said Nvidia would acquire US$1 billion (S$1.2 billion) of its new shares to finance a project to expand an AI data centre.<\/p>\n
The move underscores a deepening partnership between the two companies, which in June announced plans to build global AI infrastructure to tap demand for sovereign AI in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
As the first step, the two firms and investment group Brookfield announced on Friday plans to expand Naver’s AI data centre in South Korea with up to US$10 billion in funding.<\/p>\n
Naver said on Monday it will place 7.2 million new shares with Nvidia for 204,500 won each, or a one per cent discount to its closing price on Friday, as part of the agreement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brookfield will provide up to $9 billion in financing as the project’s capital partner, Naver added.<\/p>\n
With the investment, Nvidia would become one of the biggest shareholders of Naver, owning a 4.5 per cent stake.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The National Pension Service was the biggest shareholder of Naver with a 9.25 per cent stake, followed by BlackRock Fund Advisors with 6.12 per cent as of end-2025.<\/p>\n
The expansion will be built at Naver’s GAK data centre in the city of Sejong in South Korea, using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Blackwell chip platforms, and it will have a capacity of 200 megawatts by 2028.<\/p>\n
In June, Naver and Nvidia announced an agreement to jointly pursue the development of gigawatt-scale global AI infrastructure in South Korea and overseas.<\/p>\n
When the deal was announced, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Naver would be 10 times larger once the vision was realised.<\/p>\n
One gigawatt is about four times the maximum capacity of GAK Sejong, South Korea’s largest hyperscale data centre operated by Naver. It represents a scale capable of accommodating hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s latest GPUs at once, Naver said.<\/p>\n
Huang has argued that nations should build and control their own AI infrastructure, a strategy that could broaden Nvidia’s customer base beyond major US hyperscalers.<\/p>\n
Nvidia has invested in AI, cloud and other companies, including a US$30 billion investment in OpenAI and a US$10 billion investment in Anthropic.<\/p>\n
[[nid:741164]]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL \u2014 Shares of South Korean internet and cloud service giant Naver jumped more than 10 per cent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[623],"tags":[1366,10699,958,657,2295],"class_list":["post-100308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-naver","tag-ai-infrastructure","tag-data-centre","tag-investment","tag-naver","tag-nvidia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}