NAVER, Brookfield and NVIDIA invest $10 billion in Korea AI factory

NAVER, Brookfield Asset Management and NVIDIA agreed to build a $10 billion AI factory in South Korea, the largest single investment in the country's push to become a global hub for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

"Korea has all the ingredients to become a global AI powerhouse — world-class networks and data centers, leadership in chip technology and vast industrial scale," Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, said. "Together with SK Telecom and SK hynix, we are building a new generation of AI factories that will power Korea's next wave of growth."

The deal is part of a broader $950 billion semiconductor cooperation package announced at the San Francisco AI Summit, which also includes a $500 billion-plus partnership between SK Group and NVIDIA spanning AI factory construction and next-generation memory supply. SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt AI cloud in Korea using the NVIDIA DSX platform and Vera Rubin accelerated computing powered by SK hynix HBM4, with the first factory expected online in 2027.

The investment signals a national-scale bet on AI infrastructure that could reshape the competitive landscape across Asia-Pacific. South Korea, home to the world's two largest memory chipmakers in Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, is positioning itself as a sovereign AI compute hub — a model that other governments may follow as demand for training and inference capacity outstrips supply.

The $10 billion NAVER-Brookfield-NVIDIA deal

NAVER, South Korea's dominant internet portal and cloud provider, signed a strategic investment agreement with NVIDIA and secured an infrastructure supply contract with Brookfield, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers with $1 trillion in assets under management. The partnership leverages NAVER's cloud and AI capabilities, Brookfield's infrastructure investment expertise and NVIDIA's GPU and high-performance computing technology to build a large-scale global AI factory.

The facility will add to the roughly 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity and about 2 million GPUs that South Korean companies and global big tech firms agreed to pursue as part of the broader cooperation framework announced at the summit. For context, 5 GW of data center capacity is roughly equivalent to the power consumption of 3.8 million U.S. homes, underscoring the scale of the buildout.

Broader ecosystem: SK, Samsung and Hyundai join the push

Beyond the NAVER deal, the San Francisco AI Summit produced a cascade of semiconductor and AI infrastructure commitments. SK Group agreed to pursue $750 billion in long-term advanced memory supply with global big tech companies including NVIDIA, while Samsung Electronics and Broadcom signed a memorandum of understanding for $200 billion in foundry cooperation over five years, covering advanced memory semiconductors and AI chip production.

Hyundai Motor Group and NVIDIA agreed to jointly build a "Robot Reference Platform," a standardized foundation for developing and verifying AI robots, and announced a self-driving car foundry plan with Waymo. Samsung SDS and Anthropic signed a strategic partnership to discover new AI markets and train engineers together.

For investors, the concentration of capital flowing into Korea's AI ecosystem creates both opportunity and risk. NVIDIA, trading at roughly 35 times forward earnings, secures a long-term demand pipeline for its Vera Rubin platform and HBM4 memory. SK hynix gains a guaranteed buyer for its next-generation high-bandwidth memory, while NAVER's cloud business gets a marquee infrastructure project that could boost its enterprise AI credibility. The risk: a 5 GW buildout timeline stretching into the 2030s could test execution discipline across all parties.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.