55MW operation set for 2027, with expansion to gigawatt scale; partnership targets AI infrastructure markets across Asia, Middle East and Europe
Naver is joining forces with Nvidia to enter the gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure race dominated by global tech giants.
The two companies announced Sunday they will jointly build a global AI factory more than four times the size of Gak Sejong, South Korea's largest hyperscale data center. The partnership is designed to extend their AI infrastructure alliance from the Asia-Pacific region into the Middle East and Europe.
One gigawatt is enough capacity to house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's latest GPUs. Industry observers say the deal elevates Naver from a simple GPU customer to a core global AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia.
Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met Sunday at Naver's second headquarters, 1784, and agreed to jointly develop a gigawatt-scale global AI factory.
The joint project is a comprehensive partnership in which the two companies will together identify global AI demand, build out infrastructure and advance the underlying technology.
The collaboration goes well beyond simply procuring GPUs for internal services — it has expanded into a joint business model targeting the global AI infrastructure market. Lee and Huang agreed to extend their leadership in the AI infrastructure ecosystem from the Asia-Pacific region to the Middle East and Europe.
Under the agreement, Naver will use Gak Sejong as the launchpad for its global AI factory business. The company plans to begin operating a 55-megawatt facility in the first half of 2027, scaling up to 100MW later that year and 200MW by 2028.
Naver will then expand overseas in stages, with the ultimate goal of reaching gigawatt-scale capacity. According to Naver, 1GW is roughly four times the capacity of Gak Sejong.
"This is not a single-campus cluster — the plan is to distribute capacity across multiple sites and ultimately reach gigawatt-scale infrastructure," a Naver Cloud official said. "The final scale has not yet been determined." The official's remarks left open the possibility of expanding to 2GW or 3GW, depending on market demand and ongoing discussions with Nvidia.
Industry watchers say the deal marks Naver's full entry into the ultra-large AI infrastructure competition that global tech giants have been driving. Gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure projects currently in the public domain include Stargate — backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle — with a 10GW target, Meta's Hyperion at 5GW, and AWS's Indiana facility at 2.2GW. Naver and Nvidia have yet to finalize their total capacity, but their official commitment to gigawatt-scale infrastructure places them squarely in that league.
Technical cooperation between the two companies will also broaden significantly. Naver's accumulated expertise in building and operating large-scale GPU clusters and hyperscale data centers will be combined with Nvidia's next-generation high-performance infrastructure platform, DSX. The aim is to improve data center operational efficiency and secure the infrastructure capability to handle large AI workloads reliably.
Collaboration on physical AI and spatial intelligence will also move forward. Naver plans to build a "Seoul World Model" by combining Nvidia's world foundation model Cosmos with its own spatial modeling technology and street-view data. The next-generation initiative is designed to let AI understand and simulate real-world urban environments based on actual city data.
The two companies will continue cooperating on AI models as well. Naver recently became the first South Korean company to join the Nvidia Nemotron Alliance. It plans to combine the results of joint Nemotron development with its own data and training expertise to accelerate performance upgrades for HyperCLOVA X and broaden its global applicability.
"This alliance allows us to offer a concrete alternative for countries and regions around the world to build their own sovereign AI capabilities, which is very encouraging," Lee said. "This partnership is deeply meaningful in that it creates an opportunity for Naver's technological infrastructure competitiveness to take a significant leap into the global market."
rim@heraldcorp.com
