The announced was unveiled at a media round table in central Seoul on Thursday led by Kim Kwang-hyun, Naver's chief data and contents officer, in his first public appearance since taking the role in February.
The company, headed by CEO Choi Soo-yeon, said the spending will fund efforts to surface high-quality creators and feed their work into its AI services.
"As a CDO, I will build up quality data — the foundation of execution-capable agents — through our creator ecosystem and external partnerships, connect it to AI to deliver differentiated user experiences, and dive more aggressively into the competition," Kim said.
As part of the strategy, Naver is launching a fellowship called Naver Mate, which will select about 3,000 top contributors each month from its blog, cafe, Knowledge iN and Premium Content platforms, ranked by how often their work is cited in the company's AI Briefing service.
Kim Sang-bum, head of Naver's search platform division, said the company's edge lies in its product-native large language model, a trove of about 10 billion data records, and the operational know-how built up over more than two decades of running its own search ecosystem. A next-generation HyperCLOVA X model will also be deployed shortly, he added.
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