Nvidia Completes $1 Billion Investment for 4.13% Stake in Naver

Naver said on Friday that it had issued 6,558,435 new common shares to Nvidia in a third-party share placement and received the full payment of 1.3411999575 trillion won, about $1 billion. The share count and amount are the same as the terms set on November 3, and the total works out to 204,500 won a share. Naver said the money will go to new businesses built around AI factories.

The stake makes Nvidia's role in Naver's infrastructure plans financial as well as technical. Most of Nvidia's deals with cloud and internet companies run the other way, with customers spending billions on its chips. Here the chipmaker is putting its own capital into a company that will run and rent out capacity built on its GPUs. That makes it an investor in the economics of Korea's sovereign AI build-out, not only a supplier.

The investment follows the AI factory partnership the two companies announced in June. That month Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met Naver founder Lee Hae-jin at Naver's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, on June 8. An AI factory, in the companies' terms, combines GPUs, data centres, networking and software into one system for training, fine-tuning and running AI models.

The first site is Naver's Gak Sejong data centre in Sejong City, according to the company. Naver Cloud will operate the infrastructure, Nvidia will supply the platform and technology, and Brookfield, the global asset manager, will invest in the physical infrastructure. Brookfield has signed a contract with Naver to secure up to $9 billion in computing infrastructure, according to JKN, a Korean business outlet.

The plan is to begin running 55 megawatts of AI infrastructure at Gak Sejong in the first half of 2027 and expand to 200 megawatts by 2028. Naver's longer-term goal is 1 gigawatt. The capacity is meant to grow Naver's GPU-as-a-service business, which rents computing power to companies, public institutions and international AI cloud customers.

The cooperation also covers Naver's own AI models and agents, as well as physical AI and world models, the systems used to train robots and simulate real environments.

The deal closed in a bad week for Korean technology shares. The Kospi fell 6% on Friday, with chip stocks leading the decline, as investors priced in tougher US rules on AI and data centres after the American midterm elections. Brookfield's capital, Nvidia's equity and the 55-megawatt first phase due in 2027 now give Naver a funded path for its first stage. Whether it reaches the 1 gigawatt target will depend on demand for rented GPU capacity holding up.