Nvidia is buying $1 billion worth of newly issued shares in Naver, the South Korean internet giant, to help finance a major AI data center project.
According to the Korea JoongAng Daily and The Korea Times, the purchase gives Nvidia a 4.5% stake in Naver. The Korea Herald reports the two companies plan to establish a 200-megawatt "AI factory" by 2028 — industry shorthand for a data center purpose-built to train and run AI models rather than serve ordinary web traffic.
Investors liked it. Channel NewsAsia reported that Naver shares jumped more than 10% on Monday after the company said Nvidia would acquire $1 billion of its new shares to fund the data center expansion, and Investing.com noted the stock hit a one-month high.
The Wall Street Journal framed the deal as potentially bigger than its headline number, reporting that the planned investment could pave the way for a broader multibillion-dollar push into AI infrastructure in South Korea. Benzinga described the move as Nvidia deepening an existing South Korea strategy rather than starting one.
The structure matters as much as the sum. Nvidia isn't lending money or simply selling chips — it is taking equity in a customer that will, in turn, buy and deploy computing capacity. That arrangement ties Nvidia's fortunes to the buildout it supplies, a pattern that has become increasingly common as the company channels capital toward the partners constructing AI capacity worldwide.
For Naver, best known at home as a search and services platform, the deal brings both cash and a privileged relationship with the world's dominant supplier of AI chips at a moment when access to that hardware is the main bottleneck for anyone building large models.
It matters because AI capacity is becoming national infrastructure, and this deal marks South Korea as a place where it will be built.