NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield have announced plans to expand Korea's sovereign AI factory infrastructure, scaling the initial NVIDIA DSX deployment to 200 megawatts by 2028 and laying the groundwork for a national push toward gigawatt-scale compute.
Unveiled on July 24, 2026, during South Korean President Jae Myung Lee's AI Summit visit to San Francisco, the planned expansion would more than triple the 55-megawatt buildout announced only a month earlier. The deal assembles three of the most active players in global AI infrastructure — a national cloud champion, the dominant accelerated-computing supplier, and one of the world's largest infrastructure investors — behind a single sovereign AI project.
The deal in numbers
The 200-megawatt AI factory will be built with the NVIDIA DSX platform at NAVER's GAK Sejong hyperscale data center in Sejong, South Korea. Under the proposed financing structure, NVIDIA plans to invest $1 billion into NAVER Corp., while Brookfield has entered a nonbinding term sheet to fund up to $9 billion. NAVER will fund the remaining amounts.
NVIDIA's planned investment is subject to customary closing conditions and to NAVER finalizing at least $9 billion of committed financing for the project, separate from NVIDIA's contribution. The expanded infrastructure is intended to give Korea- and U.S.-based AI innovators access to production-scale compute for building next-generation models, agents, and AI-powered services.
NAVER's ambitions extend well beyond the 200-megawatt milestone. The company intends to expand its deployment of NVIDIA AI infrastructure toward 1 gigawatt, framing the Sejong factory as the first phase of a much larger sovereign compute buildout.
What leaders said
"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."
Sikander Rashid, global head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield, emphasized the strategic dimension. "The partnership will combine Brookfield's global AI infrastructure investment capabilities, NAVER's full-stack AI and data center operating expertise, and NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform to advance Korea's AI capabilities," he said. "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."
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang cast the project in civilizational terms. "AI factories are the infrastructure nations need to compete and innovate in the intelligence era," he said. "Together, NAVER, NVIDIA and Brookfield are building sovereign AI infrastructure at the scale needed to fuel Korea's startups and industries. This is how nations and companies are building their futures in the age of AI."
Why sovereign AI compute is the new battleground
The announcement reflects a broader shift in how nations are approaching AI capacity. Rather than relying entirely on a handful of U.S. hyperscalers, governments and national champions are moving to build domestic, "sovereign" AI infrastructure — both for economic competitiveness and for data-residency and security reasons. Korea, with its advanced semiconductor industry and a government explicitly prioritizing AI, has become one of the most aggressive movers on this front.
The 200-megawatt factory is expected to feature advanced NVIDIA platforms including NVIDIA Vera Rubin and NVIDIA Blackwell, providing the compute, software, and support to develop and deploy competitive AI models at scale. As an NVIDIA Cloud Partner, NAVER brings deep operating expertise in running hyperscale infrastructure on the full-stack NVIDIA platform.
Brookfield's deepening AI bet
For Brookfield, the NAVER investment marks another step in a deliberately built AI infrastructure platform. The firm says it manages approximately $100 billion of assets across the AI infrastructure value chain, including data centers, compute, semiconductor manufacturing, and dedicated power generation. The NAVER deal builds on NVIDIA's participation as a founding partner in the Brookfield Global AI Infrastructure Program.
Brookfield has been an active long-term investor in Korea since establishing a presence there in 2014 and currently manages roughly $12 billion of assets across infrastructure, real estate, and energy in the country. That existing footprint helps explain both its willingness to underwrite a deal of this size and its focus on sovereign rather than purely commercial cloud economics.
The expansion builds on a June announcement in which NAVER committed to extending its GAK Sejong data center with NVIDIA DSX, with a stated long-term path to gigawatt-scale sovereign AI infrastructure serving Korea's enterprises, industries, government organizations, and global AI cloud customers.
What comes next
The deal is structured as a proposed expansion with nonbinding components, meaning execution will depend on NAVER securing its financing and the parties closing on customary terms. If it proceeds, the Sejong factory would stand among the larger dedicated AI compute sites in Asia and a flagship for the sovereign-infrastructure model that a growing number of countries are now pursuing.
With President Lee using the AI Summit to publicly align Korea's industrial base behind the buildout, and with both NVIDIA and Brookfield committing capital and platforms, the project signals that the competition for AI leadership is increasingly being fought not just in research labs, but in concrete, steel, and megawatts.
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