Mr. Sikander Rashid reports

NAVER, NVIDIA AND BROOKFIELD TO EXPAND KOREA'S NATIONAL AI FACTORY INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDOUT

Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. have proposed an expansion of Korea's sovereign AI (artificial intelligence) factory infrastructure, with planned investments that will grow the initial Nvidia DSX AI factory deployment to 200 megawatts -- more than tripling the 55-megawatt buildout announced last month. Naver intends to expand its deployment of Nvidia AI infrastructure to one gigawatt.

News summary:

• Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield plan to invest in gigawatt-scale, multitenant AI cloud infrastructure to power the next generation of AI companies in Korea and the United States.
• Naver and Nvidia team plan to expand the initial Nvidia DSX AI factory buildout at GAK Sejong data centre from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028.
• Naver plans to continue its path toward gigawatt-scale sovereign AI infrastructure, deploying the Nvidia DSX platform to deliver full-stack, lowest-cost AI factory infrastructure for enterprises, industries and government.

Announced during Korea President Jae Myung Lee's AI Summit visit to San Francisco, the planned 200-megawatt expansion marks a significant acceleration of Korea's national AI ambitions. The expanded infrastructure will be built with the Nvidia DSX platform at Naver's GAK Sejong hyperscale data centre in Sejong, South Korea.

Nvidia plans to invest $1-billion into Naver Corp. and Brookfield plans to finance up to $9-billion for AI infrastructure. Naver will finance the remaining amounts to finance the project. Nvidia's planned investment is subject to customary closing conditions. The expanded infrastructure will provide Korea- and U.S.-based AI innovators with access to production-scale AI compute for building next-generation models, agents and AI-powered services.

"Nvidia's planned strategic investment and our infrastructure supply agreement with Brookfield have propelled Naver's vision for the AI factory business into a robust execution phase," said Haejin Lee, founder and chairman of Naver. "Leveraging the solid partnerships with our global partners, we will drive technological innovation, foster a sovereign AI ecosystem and spearhead efforts to strengthen South Korea's AI competitiveness."

"The partnership will combine Brookfield's global AI infrastructure investment capabilities, Naver's full-stack AI and data centre operating expertise, and Nvidia's accelerated computing platform to advance Korea's AI capabilities," said Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield. "As AI adoption accelerates across the global economy, access to trusted, sovereign and scalable AI infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important strategic priority for companies and countries."

"AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to compete and innovate in the intelligence era," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia. "Together, Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield are building sovereign AI infrastructure at the scale needed to fuel Korea's start-ups and industries. This is how nations and companies are building their futures in the age of AI."

Expanding AI factory capacity to fuel AI innovators

The 200-megawatt AI factory is expected to feature advanced Nvidia AI infrastructure including the Nvidia Vera Rubin and Nvidia Blackwell platforms. It intends to establish a dedicated resource pool for emerging AI companies, providing the compute, software, and support needed to develop and deploy competitive AI models and applications at scale. As an Nvidia Cloud partner, Naver provides deep expertise in operating hyperscale infrastructure powered by the full-stack Nvidia AI platform.

Today's proposed expansion builds on the June announcement in which Naver committed to extending its GAK Sejong data centre with Nvidia DSX, with a long-term path to gigawatt-scale sovereign AI infrastructure to serve Korea's enterprises, industries, government organizations and global AI cloud customers.

Brookfield Investments scale AI infrastructure deployments

Brookfield has established one of the industry's leading AI infrastructure investment platforms, with approximately $100-billion of assets under management across the AI infrastructure value chain including data centres, compute, semiconductor manufacturing and dedicated power generation.

The planned Naver investment will mark another significant milestone in Brookfield's strategic partnership with Nvidia. Building on Nvidia's participation as a founding partner in the Brookfield Global AI Infrastructure Program, the planned investment combines Brookfield's capital and AI infrastructure, and power expertise with Nvidia's accelerated computing platform to support the deployment of large-scale AI factories.

Brookfield has been an active, long-term investor in Korea since establishing a presence in the country in 2014 across infrastructure, real estate and energy.

Nvidia DSX platform powers expansion

The Nvidia DSX platform provides an end-to-end, co-designed stack for AI factories -- spanning chips, systems, software, facilities and partner technologies -- purpose built to minimize token cost and accelerate time to first production.

Nvidia DSX MaxLPS software maximizes token throughput per megawatt, while Nvidia DSX OS provides life cycle management, health automation, resiliency and multitenant AI factory management across the expanded infrastructure.

Open models accelerate growth

In addition, the expanded infrastructure builds on Naver and Nvidia's collaboration on open model development for agentic and physical AI. Naver is advancing its HyperClova X models to be based on Nvidia Nemotron 3 Ultra open models with its proprietary data and training expertise. Naver is also the first Korean company to join the Nvidia Nemotron Coalition, contributing to open model development across pretraining, post-training and reinforcement learning.

Naver plans to launch an AI agent platform in Korea in the second half of the year, powered by Nvidia Agent Toolkit software including Nvidia NemoClaw blueprints. Naver is also developing a Seoul World Model using proprietary urban street-view and spatial modeling data, built on Nvidia Cosmos world foundation models.

About Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Brookfield is a leading global investment firm with more than $1-trillion in assets under management. The firm owns and operates high-quality businesses and real assets that provide essential services and form the backbone of the global economy. Brookfield invests on behalf of institutions and individuals around the world across infrastructure, energy, private equity, real estate and credit. With more than a century of operating experience and a global presence in over 30 countries, Brookfield deploys long-term capital to generate sustainable value for its clients and shareholders. Brookfield Corp. and Brookfield Asset Management are publicly traded in New York and Toronto.

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