Nvidia buys 4.5% of Naver for $1B to build Korea's AI factory

Nvidia is putting roughly $1.01 billion into South Korea's Naver — not as a GPU credit or an MOU, but as cash for stock. Naver is issuing 7.2 million new shares at ₩204,500 each via third-party allotment, with Nvidia as sole subscriber. That hands Jensen Huang's company about a 4.5% stake and a seat among Naver's largest shareholders. Naver stock jumped ~10% on the news.

The money funds Naver's AI factory at the GAK Sejong hyperscale data center, where Nvidia supplies the silicon: Blackwell, Vera Rubin, and the DSX platform. The ramp is aggressive — 55MW in H1 2027, 100MW by end of 2027, 200MW in 2028. Brookfield has signed a nonbinding term sheet for up to $9 billion more, putting the total program near $10B.

It fits a wider Korea sweep: a $500B-scale accord with SK Group, SK Telecom's gigawatt AI cloud, SK Hynix memory co-development, plus Doosan and LG. The pattern is Nvidia financing the demand for its own chips — sovereign AI as a vendor-financed category, with nations buying domestic control over compute, data, and models.

Why it matters: when your chip supplier becomes your shareholder, "customer pipeline" and "investment portfolio" start looking like the same balance sheet.