Details
- NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield announced a proposed expansion of the NVIDIA DSX AI factory at NAVER’s GAK Sejong hyperscale data center from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028, with NAVER targeting 1 gigawatt of sovereign AI infrastructure longer term.
- The initiative involves NVIDIA planning a $1 billion strategic investment into NAVER and Brookfield signing a nonbinding term sheet to provide up to $9 billion in financing, with NAVER funding remaining project costs.
- The 200MW AI factory is expected to use NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin and Blackwell platforms and the DSX stack, including DSX MaxLPS software and DSX OS for multi-tenant lifecycle management, to minimize token cost and support large-scale AI model training and deployment.
- This expansion accelerates a roadmap first detailed in June 2026, when NAVER and NVIDIA outlined phased capacity growth from 55MW in 2027 to 100MW later that year and 200MW by 2028, positioning NAVER as a key anchor tenant for NVIDIA’s DSX strategy.
- Brookfield, which manages about $100 billion in AI-related infrastructure assets and roughly $12 billion in Korea, adds capital and power expertise to a deal aimed at giving Korean and U.S. AI startups and enterprises access to production-scale, sovereign AI compute outside U.S. hyperscaler clouds.
Impact
The planned 200MW expansion and path to gigawatt scale make Korea one of the more aggressive sovereign AI infrastructure builders, reinforcing a trend toward nationally controlled AI factories and diversified compute supply. Over the next 12–24 months, this is likely to draw AI startups and enterprise workloads to NAVER’s cloud, intensify competition with U.S. hyperscalers and TPU-based ecosystems, and shape regional R&D and funding toward large-scale, open-model and agentic AI development.
