Naver's founder and board chair Lee Hae-jin, left, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attend a welcome event at Naver's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, on June 8.NEWS1
Naver shares jumped 8.43 percent on Monday to close at 225,000 won ($153) as investors read Nvidia's $1 billion investment as confirmation that the company will sit at the center of the AI factory network Nvidia is assembling worldwide.
Naver disclosed the deal in a regulatory filing on Monday. Nvidia is taking a 4.5 percent stake through a third-party share allotment of 7,241,564 new shares priced at 204,500 won each, with payment due Oct. 30.
Once the sale closes, Nvidia will be Naver's third-largest shareholder, behind the National Pension Service at 8.6 percent and BlackRock at 6.12 percent. Lee Hae-jin, who founded Naver and chairs its board, holds 3.91 percent.
A third-party allotment raises money from a new investor rather than from existing shareholders. The last time Naver raised money from a new investor was 2004, when the company, then called NHN, brought in 36 billion won from a Chinese game publisher to expand into China. Everything it has built since has been funded from its own cash.
The recent investment will go into the AI factory business Naver is building with Nvidia. An AI factory is a platform that handles the full span of AI work, from gathering data through running inference.
"Nvidia decided to invest directly because of the full-stack AI capability Naver holds, covering everything from model development to service deployment," a Naver source said. "Naver has tuned data center technologies, including cooling, power and networking, for AI workloads and internalized them."
Naver founder Lee Hae-jin speaks during an AI summit held in San Francisco, California on July 24.NEWS1
Nvidia attached a condition to the share sale: Naver has to line up $9 billion worth of computing infrastructure. Naver has entered full negotiations with Brookfield Asset Management, a global investment firm that leads the market in AI infrastructure, for that financing. With both deals closed, Naver will have raised $10 billion, the largest sum in its history.
The first site is Gak Sejong, Naver's data center in Sejong, where Nvidia GPUs will be concentrated and scaled up. Naver is aiming to run a 55-megawatt AI factory there in the first half of 2027 and a 200-megawatt one in 2028, then push toward a gigawatt to meet global demand for AI infrastructure. It plans to take what it has learned running hyperscale data centers in Korea into the Middle East and Europe.
Naver wants the business generating revenue from next year.
Separately, Naver will retire about 4.9 million treasury shares, worth roughly 1 trillion won, on Aug. 3.
Analysts had been waiting to see how Naver would pay for any of it.
"There was a question mark over how Naver was going to raise money on the scale the AI factory business with Nvidia requires," said Lim Hee-seok, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities. "This share sale has answered it."
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
