NAVER, NVIDIA, and Brookfield announced on July 25, 2026, a $10 billion investment to expand South Korea's sovereign AI factory infrastructure from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028 at NAVER's GAK Sejong hyperscale data center. The financing breaks down as: NVIDIA committing $1 billion direct equity investment into NAVER; Brookfield entering a nonbinding term sheet for up to $9 billion; and NAVER funding the remainder. The announcement, made during South Korean President Jae-myung Lee's AI Summit visit to San Francisco, triples the capacity announced just six weeks prior and positions Korea as a leading AI infrastructure hub outside the US.
The 200-megawatt facility will feature NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Blackwell accelerators and serve as a sovereign AI compute pool for Korean startups, enterprises, government, and US-based AI innovators. NAVER's long-term ambition is gigawatt-scale capacity; the 200MW phase represents 20% of NAVER's KRW 550 trillion ($377B USD) national AI commitment announced in late June 2026, part of a tripartite national megaproject with SK Group and GS Group targeting 8.4 gigawatts by 2029. Brookfield brings $100B in assets under management across the AI infrastructure value chain globally.
For practitioners: This signals Seoul's willingness to compete on capex intensity for sovereign AI capabilities, matching US/China scale. Korea is betting government backing + NVIDIA tech + hyperscaler-grade operations = cost parity or advantage versus US hyperscaler pricing. The open variable: pricing. No public rate structure announced; if compute costs NVIDIA-parity USD, the 'sovereign' framing dissolves. Monitor Korea's AI startup adoption rates and capital efficiency curves starting 2028. Watch for similar playbooks in Europe (EU Gigafactories) and Southeast Asia.