Nvidia is set to invest 1.48 trillion won ($1.48 billion) to become the third-largest shareholder in Naver. This partnership is evolving beyond a simple GPU supply relationship into a capital and technology alliance focused on artificial intelligence (AI) factory operations and shared corporate value.
On July 27, Naver announced it would issue 7,241,564 common shares to Nvidia through a third-party allocation capital increase. The new share price is set at 204,500 won per share, with the expected total amount raised being approximately 1.48 trillion won. This marks Naver's first third-party allocation capital increase in 22 years.
With this investment, Nvidia will secure about 4.5% of Naver's shares, making it the third-largest shareholder after the National Pension Service (8.09%) and BlackRock (6.02%). Naver plans to buy back and retire 1 trillion won worth of its own shares on August 3 to enhance shareholder value.
This investment follows a June agreement between the two companies to establish a gigawatt-scale global AI factory. Naver intends to use the funds raised for new AI factory projects, with plans to invest approximately 5 billion won this year, increasing to 692 billion won in 2027 and 783 billion won in 2028.
The overall project, valued at $10 billion (approximately 14.6 trillion won), will see Naver secure GPU supply from Nvidia while also collaborating with Brookfield, an alternative asset manager, to procure data center and power infrastructure.
With this investment, Naver aims to shift its business model from a service-centric infrastructure to a revenue-generating structure that provides AI computing resources to external companies and governments. Its subsidiary, Naver Cloud, is also in discussions with Nvidia regarding an 'AI Compute Partnership.' Naver plans to operate a large-scale cluster of up to 100,000 GPUs to actively target the sovereign AI market based on GPU as a service (GPUaaS).
* This article has been translated by AI.
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