{"id":111766,"date":"2026-08-07T05:56:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T05:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/111766\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T05:56:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T05:56:20","slug":"naver-ceo-calls-ai-factory-an-investment-in-structural-growth-eyes-monetization-next-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/111766\/","title":{"rendered":"Naver CEO Calls AI Factory an Investment in Structural Growth, Eyes Monetization Next Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img alt=\"Naver CI. Photo courtesy of Naver - Seoul Economic Daily Technology News from South Korea\" title=\"Naver CEO Calls AI Factory an Investment in Structural Growth, Eyes Monetization Next Year\" fetchpriority=\"high\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"w-full h-auto rounded-sm\" style=\"color:transparent;object-fit:contain;object-position:center\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/news-p.v1.20260807.b7693358ca854022b81cfcebb548d784_P1.png\"\/>Naver CI. Photo courtesy of Naver<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-[var(--color-text)] leading-relaxed\">Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver (035420.KS), described the artificial intelligence (AI) factory business the company is pursuing with Nvidia as &#8220;an investment in a structurally growing market, not a one-time business opportunity.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-[var(--color-text)] leading-relaxed\">At a second-quarter earnings conference call held on the 7th, Choi said, &#8220;With the spread of generative AI, the AI transformation across industries, and the expansion of inference and AI agents, global AI computing demand will continue to rise over the medium to long term.&#8221; She added, &#8220;There are concerns that computing usage will decline with the recent emergence of low-cost, high-efficiency models, but as the cost per computation falls, AI adoption, inference, and agents will instead spread, driving overall computing demand.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-[var(--color-text)] leading-relaxed\">Earlier, in June, Naver announced it was pursuing a 1 gigawatt (GW) AI factory construction project with Nvidia. On Naver&#8217;s capabilities in building and operating large-scale AI infrastructure, Choi said, &#8220;Despite rising computing demand, expanding supply requires large-scale power, land, cooling, facilities, specialized personnel, and social consent all at once, which takes considerable time.&#8221; She stressed, &#8220;But Naver already has technology and supply cooperation with Nvidia, prepared power and land, capital partnerships, and full-stack operational capabilities accumulated over a long period.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-[var(--color-text)] leading-relaxed\">Choi also expressed confidence in the safety of the business. &#8220;To solidify this partnership, Nvidia has decided to participate in a Naver rights offering worth approximately $1 billion,&#8221; she said. &#8220;This means the two companies have developed into a long-term partnership that shares both business performance and risk.&#8221; She continued, &#8220;We are in discussions to raise the $9 billion in computing infrastructure needed to build the AI factory together with Brookfield, a global asset manager.&#8221; She assessed, &#8220;Through a structure in which Nvidia handles equipment and the ecosystem, the capital partner handles infrastructure investment, and our company handles platform operation and customer service, we have laid the foundation to expand the business quickly while minimizing the initial capital burden.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-[var(--color-text)] leading-relaxed\">Meanwhile, Naver posted second-quarter revenue of 3.3888 trillion won and operating profit of 520.3 billion won on a consolidated basis. Revenue rose 16.2% from a year earlier, a quarterly record, but operating profit fell 0.2% due to the impact of expanded AI infrastructure investment. Naver expects revenue related to the AI factory business to begin in the first half of next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Naver CI. Photo courtesy of Naver Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver (035420.KS), described the artificial intelligence (AI) factory&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[623],"tags":[57354,11933,48359,661,657,2295,37282,9129],"class_list":["post-111766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-naver","tag-ai-computing-demand","tag-ai-factory","tag-brookfield","tag-choi-soo-yeon","tag-naver","tag-nvidia","tag-q2-earnings","tag-rights-offering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111766","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=111766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}