Analysis
Nvidia agreed to buy 7.2 million newly issued shares of Naver, South Korea's dominant internet and cloud company, at 204,500 won (about $139.45) apiece -- roughly a 1% discount to Friday's closing price -- for a 4.5% stake and about $1 billion in proceeds. Naver shares jumped more than 10% on the news, one of the stock's biggest single-day moves this year.
The capital is earmarked for expanding Naver's GAK Sejong AI data center from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028, a buildout Brookfield Asset Management has separately proposed funding with up to $9 billion of its own capital. Together, the two commitments turn a single Korean data center campus into one of the larger disclosed AI infrastructure projects outside the US and China this year.
“Together, the two commitments turn a single Korean data center campus into one of the larger disclosed AI infrastructure projects outside the US and China this year.”
For Nvidia, the Naver stake is the latest in a growing pattern of taking direct equity positions in the companies building out AI infrastructure on its chips, rather than simply selling them hardware -- a strategy that also includes its financing discussions with OpenAI and its role in the SK Group's roughly $500 billion Korean AI initiative announced earlier this year.
The move reinforces Korea's position as a second major Asian AI infrastructure hub alongside China and Japan, with Samsung and SK Hynix both racing to supply memory and foundry capacity for the same buildout -- Naver's data center expansion effectively guarantees a domestic customer for that supply chain.
What to watch: whether Naver's GAK Sejong facility hits its 200-megawatt target on the 2028 timeline, how Brookfield's proposed $9 billion commitment gets structured relative to Nvidia's equity stake, and whether Nvidia extends similar direct-investment structures to other regional cloud providers building sovereign AI capacity.
