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On June 8, 2026, Chairman Lee Hae-jin of NAVER's Board of Directors sat down with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who visited NAVER's headquarters at 1784, to discuss a concrete collaboration roadmap and joint go-to-market strategy for global markets. Below is an introduction to the background and significance of this partnership as shared by Chairman Lee, along with key highlights from the press conference Q&A.

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NAVER: Already Built for the AI Factory Business

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NAVER is the world's first company to have built a SuperPOD using NVIDIA GPUs. Having stably operated some of Asia's largest services while handling every stage of data center design, construction, and operations in-house, NAVER already possesses the capabilities to meaningfully absorb the rapidly expanding global demand for AI infrastructure.

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The frontline base for this is the hyperscale data center "GAK Sejong." Starting with 55MW of capacity in the first half of 2027, it will scale to 100MW within the same year and 200MW by 2028. The ultimate goal is to build a GW-scale AI factory capable of simultaneously housing hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA's latest GPUs.

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Combining NAVER's Accumulated Tech and Operational Capabilities with the NVIDIA Platform

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NAVER's unrivaled capabilities in building and operating large-scale GPU clusters, along with its hyperscale data center expertise, are set to be integrated with NVIDIA's next-generation high-performance infrastructure platform, DSX. Through this combination, both companies plan to maximize data center operational efficiency and significantly strengthen the business case for the AI Factory.

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On the AI model front, the two companies will pursue the development of a "Seoul World Model" — combining NVIDIA's world foundation model Cosmos with NAVER's proprietary spatial modeling capabilities and street-view data. Building on the digital twin and robotics capabilities NAVER has accumulated at 1784, next-generation technology collaboration in the field of spatial intelligence will also move into full gear. NAVER has also become the first Korean company to join the NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition — a global alliance of 12 AI companies including Cursor, Mistral AI, and Perplexity — further strengthening its position within the global AI ecosystem.

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A Global Partnership That Connects the Entire Value Chain

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What makes this alliance truly significant is the scope of collaboration. This is not a simple technology partnership — it is a structure in which both companies jointly design and drive every stage of the value chain, from identifying global demand to capital collaboration. NAVER will participate as a core partner sharing both the outcomes and the risks of the business, and the two companies will work together to expand the AI infrastructure ecosystem beyond Asia-Pacific into European and Middle Eastern markets as well. This represents a tremendous growth opportunity for both NAVER and NVIDIA.

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Through this collaboration, we are now able to offer a concrete and actionable alternative for countries and regions around the world seeking to build their own sovereign AI capabilities. For NAVER, this marks a pivotal moment of taking a meaningful leap into the global stage ●

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Key Q&A from Press Conference with Chairman Lee Hae-jin and CEO Jensen Huang

Q. NVIDIA works with many Korean companies. What makes NAVER a special partner for NVIDIA, and what do you see as NAVER's key technical strengths?

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Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA | Korea has remarkable expertise not only in manufacturing, heavy industry, and electronics, but also in software — and a significant part of Korea's software capabilities and world-class cloud competency can be attributed to NAVER. The fact that a company like this emerged from a relatively small country is truly impressive.

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NAVER and NVIDIA worked together on Korea's first AI model development, and NAVER was NVIDIA's first AI supercomputer customer and partner in Southeast Asia. Chairman Lee and the NAVER team recognized early on how important it was to expand from cloud services into AI, building on cloud as their core competency.

Today we are announcing three new areas of collaboration. The first is building frontier AI models through the Nemotron Coalition. The second is jointly building a 200-megawatt AI Factory together — and this is just the beginning. We will scale this to gigawatt level, and when that vision is realized, NAVER will be a company ten times larger than it is today. The third is the joint advancement of robotics technology. NAVER has been developing robotics systems for over a decade, and we will work together to accelerate that progress further and faster.

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Q. Other Korean companies are also pursuing AI Factory partnerships with NVIDIA. How will NAVER build a differentiated partnership?

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Chairman Lee Hae-jin, Chairman of NAVER | NAVER is the world's first company to have built a SuperPOD using GPUs, and we operate some of Asia's largest services with proven stability. We are not at the stage of just beginning to build a cloud infrastructure to launch an AI Factory business — we have already been designing and operating our own data centers for years, and we are fully prepared. I believe NAVER is the only company right now — not in the future, but right now — that can meet the rapidly growing demand in the GPU and AI market. That is precisely why NVIDIA has chosen to partner with NAVER to expand the AI Factory into Asia.

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Q. What is the ultimate goal of the Nemotron Coalition, and what is NAVER's specific role within it?

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Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA | Many countries, companies, and specific use cases require more than general-purpose intelligence to address every challenge they face. Even starting from a powerful frontier intelligence, AI must then be adapted and applied to each specific purpose — whether that means tailoring it to the Korean language and culture, applying it to science or digital biology, or bringing language models into robotics and manufacturing. To achieve that kind of specialized refinement, a strong open frontier model as the starting point is absolutely essential.

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The purpose of Nemotron is to broaden the reach of AI into areas where closed models struggle to serve. Our reason for partnering with NAVER is clear: NAVER has outstanding expertise in developing AI models and advancing the AI frontier. Together, we will combine our respective capabilities, training data, and expertise to build a powerful frontier model as that starting point. From there, NAVER can take that frontier model and adapt and refine it for NAVER Cloud, robotics, and its wide range of services.

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► Read more on Kim Yu-won, CEO of NAVER CLOUD, Presents Vision for a Global AI Factory (​Link)