Nvidia will pay about $1 billion for a roughly 4.5% stake in Naver, South Korea's largest internet company, the two firms said, anchoring a $10 billion push to build one of Asia's biggest "sovereign AI" data centers and adding another customer to the growing list of AI infrastructure partners in which the chipmaker now holds equity.
The deal, unveiled July 24 during South Korean President Lee Jae-myung's AI Summit visit to San Francisco and reported over the following days, sent Naver shares up more than 10% in Seoul. Under the terms, Naver placed 7.2 million new shares with Nvidia at 204,500 won apiece — a roughly 1% discount to the prior close — with payment scheduled for Oct. 30. The purchase would make Nvidia one of Naver's largest shareholders.
A $10 billion factory in Sejong
The equity check is the smallest piece of a much larger structure. Brookfield, the Canadian asset manager with about $1 trillion under management, has signed a nonbinding term sheet to fund up to $9 billion as the project's lead capital partner, with Naver covering the remainder. Crucially, Nvidia's investment is contingent on Naver locking down at least $9 billion of committed financing separate from Nvidia's own money — a condition that keeps the chipmaker's exposure modest while ensuring the buildout actually gets funded.
The capital will more than triple an AI factory the partners first announced in June. The planned expansion takes the initial Nvidia DSX deployment at Naver's GAK Sejong hyperscale data center from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028, running on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin and current Blackwell platforms. Naver says it intends to keep scaling toward a full gigawatt of sovereign AI infrastructure — a benchmark only a handful of national-scale projects have targeted.
"NVIDIA's planned strategic investment and our infrastructure supply agreement with Brookfield have propelled NAVER's vision for the AI factory business into a robust execution phase," said Haejin Lee, Naver's founder and chairman. "Leveraging the solid partnerships with our global partners, we will drive technological innovation, foster a sovereign AI ecosystem and spearhead efforts to strengthen South Korea's AI competitiveness."
The factory is pitched as multi-tenant compute for both Korean and U.S. AI developers, offering production-scale capacity for training and serving models, agents and other applications. Naver, an Nvidia Cloud Partner, will also base its next HyperCLOVA X models on Nvidia's Nemotron open models and plans to launch an AI agent platform in Korea in the second half of the year.
Nvidia's equity-in-customers playbook
The Naver stake fits a pattern that has come to define Nvidia's strategy in the current AI cycle: writing equity checks into the very companies that buy its chips. Over the past year the chipmaker has taken or pledged stakes across a widening circle of customers and partners building AI capacity, from marquee model labs to infrastructure operators. The logic is straightforward — Nvidia converts a slice of its cash pile into ownership of the demand base for its GPUs, while giving cash-hungry buildouts a credibility signal that helps them raise the far larger sums needed for land, power and silicon.
That same logic has drawn scrutiny. Critics have flagged the "circular financing" quality of arrangements in which Nvidia invests in customers who then spend the money — and much more — buying Nvidia hardware. The Naver deal is structured to blunt that critique: at roughly $1 billion for 4.5%, Nvidia's equity is dwarfed by Brookfield's up-to-$9 billion commitment, and the chipmaker's money is explicitly conditioned on independent financing being secured first. Brookfield, notably, was a founding partner in Nvidia's $100 billion Global AI Infrastructure Program, and manages about $100 billion in AI-related assets — making it, not Nvidia, the financial engine here.
For Brookfield, the appeal is the asset class itself. "As AI adoption accelerates across the global economy, access to trusted, sovereign and scalable AI infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important strategic priority for companies and countries," said Sikander Rashid, the firm's global head of AI infrastructure.
Korea's sovereign AI moment
The announcement lands amid a burst of Korean AI dealmaking timed to President Lee's U.S. visit. In the same window, Nvidia expanded a partnership with SK Group spanning AI factories and next-generation memory, and launched a joint research lab with KAIST. Samsung and SK are separately pursuing long-term AI chip and infrastructure deals reported to be valued near $950 billion with major U.S. tech firms amid a deepening semiconductor shortage.
"AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to compete and innovate in the intelligence era," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. "Together, NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield are building sovereign AI infrastructure at the scale needed to fuel Korea's startups and industries."
The framing — national infrastructure rather than corporate data centers — echoes Nvidia's recent sovereign-AI pacts in Japan and elsewhere, and reflects a growing conviction among governments that domestic AI compute is a strategic asset on par with energy or telecoms.
What to watch
The near-term test is financing: Nvidia's stake only closes if Naver secures its $9 billion, and Brookfield's term sheet remains nonbinding. Watch the Oct. 30 payment date and whether Brookfield's commitment firms up into a binding deal. Longer term, the questions are whether 200 megawatts by 2028 stays on schedule as Vera Rubin supply ramps, whether Naver can fill that capacity with paying tenants beyond its own workloads, and whether the gigawatt ambition attracts the power and additional capital it will require. And investors will keep asking how much of Nvidia's demand is, in the end, financed by Nvidia.
"AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to compete and innovate in the intelligence era."— Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA