Nvidia has agreed to invest $1 billion directly into Naver Corp, acquiring a 4.5% equity stake in South Korea's largest internet company as part of a $10 billion buildout of national AI infrastructure. The agreement, signed alongside Brookfield Asset Management, was announced to coincide with President Lee Jae-myung's attendance at an AI summit in San Francisco.
The financing structure is the more consequential detail for boards evaluating how AI infrastructure gets funded outside the United States. Brookfield has committed to fund up to $9 billion as the project's exclusive capital partner, Nvidia is putting in roughly $1 billion as a direct equity stake in Naver, and Naver itself is funding the remainder. Each commitment carries conditions tied to project milestones, a structure that spreads capital risk across a chipmaker, an asset manager, and the operating company rather than concentrating it on Naver's balance sheet alone.
The facility, built on Nvidia's DSX AI Factory platform, is being tripled in scale to 200 megawatts, positioning it as one of the larger dedicated AI compute buildouts outside US hyperscaler campuses. For Nvidia, taking an equity position rather than a pure supply contract mirrors a pattern the company has used elsewhere: converting customer relationships into balance-sheet stakes that align its incentives with long-term compute demand rather than one-time hardware sales.
For boards elsewhere in Asia watching sovereign AI ambitions, the deal illustrates a financing template — infrastructure investor plus chip supplier equity plus operator capital — that is becoming the default mechanism for national AI buildouts too large for any single balance sheet to absorb, and one that ties chipmakers more directly to the commercial success of the infrastructure they supply.
Source: The Korea Times
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