NAVER (035420.KS) +13.7% on NVIDIA Gigawatt AI Factory Pact
Shares of NAVER (035420.KS), the operator of South Korea's dominant search portal and the HyperCLOVA X large language model, swung from a 6.26% loss to a 13.7% gain on June 8 after the company disclosed a joint project with NVIDIA to build a gigawatt-scale "AI factory." The stock changed hands at ₩290,500 ($212) at 1:56 p.m. on the KOSPI (Korea's main stock exchange), up ₩35,000 ($25.50) from the prior close, after trading in the ₩240,000 range for most of the morning, according to Chosun Biz, the financial daily that timestamped the intraday reversal.
The structure is the story, not the headline
NVIDIA partnership announcements are now routine; what moved the stock is how this one is built. According to NAVER's disclosure and Seoul Economic Daily's English account, NAVER is not simply buying chips. It takes the role of a "key global partner that jointly bears responsibility for the performance and risks of the business" — securing data-center sites, constructing and operating the facilities, while NVIDIA supplies GPUs, sources global customers and shares the revenue and business risk. Both sides describe the arrangement as spanning "every stage of the value chain, from discovering global demand to capital cooperation," per Seoul Economic Daily.
That framing matters because it converts NAVER from a chip buyer into a co-investor in demand it does not yet control. The upside is shared global revenue; the exposure is shared capital and utilization risk on infrastructure that has to be filled with paying tenants.
Sizing the commitment
The build-out is staged. NAVER plans to begin operating a 55-megawatt AI factory in the first half of 2027, expand to 100MW later that year, and reach 200MW in 2028, with a long-term goal of gigawatt scale, according to NAVER's disclosure (Chosun Biz) and confirmed by NVIDIA's newsroom, which states the company is "starting at 55 megawatts with plans to move to gigawatt scale" on the NVIDIA DSX platform. For scale, one gigawatt is roughly four times the maximum capacity of Gak Sejong, NAVER's largest domestic hyperscale data center, and could house "hundreds of thousands" of NVIDIA's latest GPUs, per Seoul Economic Daily.
Against NAVER's roughly $27 billion market capitalization as of June 2026 (companiesmarketcap.com), the program is large relative to the company — yet neither NAVER nor NVIDIA disclosed a won or dollar capital-expenditure figure, a GPU count, or a financing split. NVIDIA's newsroom release likewise omits any specific GPU counts or dollar figures. For a fund manager, that absence is the central open item: a gigawatt of accelerated computing implies multi-billion-dollar capital intensity, and how that burden is divided between the partners is what will determine the earnings impact.
Precedent and what NAVER brings
NAVER is leaning on assets it already owns. Gak Sejong, the hyperscale data center it opened in 2023 as its largest domestic facility, anchors the early 55MW phase before the program expands overseas. On the software side, NVIDIA's newsroom states NAVER will advance its HyperCLOVA X models by fine-tuning NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra open model and develop a "Seoul World Model" from proprietary urban street-view data using NVIDIA Cosmos — positioning the deal within Korea's broader "sovereign AI" push to keep infrastructure and models domestically controlled. The partners have agreed to pursue customers across Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East, according to both companies.
What to watch
The market priced a structural re-rating on June 8, but the disclosure left the hardest numbers blank. The next concrete signals are the formal terms of the capital-cooperation agreement — the figure NAVER has not yet released — and the company's 2027 capital-expenditure guidance, which will show how much of the gigawatt build NAVER funds directly. NAVER founder and chairman Lee Hae-jin met NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's 1784 headquarters on June 8 to discuss the roadmap; the contractual detail that follows that meeting, not the meeting itself, will confirm or temper the move.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Figures are sourced from company disclosures and the cited publications as of June 8, 2026; currency conversions use an approximate rate of 1 USD = 1,370 KRW.
