NVIDIA to invest about $1.01 billion in Naver, taking a 4.5% stake tied to AI data centers

NVIDIA said it will invest about $1.01 billion in South Korea’s Naver, a deal structured around financing for artificial-intelligence data centers. In exchange, NVIDIA will take a 4.5% stake in Naver once the transaction closes, according to the announcement reported by Yahoo Finance.

For NVIDIA, the move reinforces its strategy of supporting AI compute buildouts beyond traditional server purchases, deepening ties with companies building and operating AI infrastructure. For Naver, the cash injection is positioned as a way to help fund large-scale AI capacity, a recurring theme across the global race to secure power, chips, networking equipment, and real estate for data centers.

The reported stake is relatively small, but it can be strategically meaningful when the goal is long-duration AI spending and co-development across cloud, infrastructure, and applications. A 4.5% position suggests NVIDIA is seeking influence and alignment rather than control, while still benefiting from Naver’s progress as AI workloads scale.

The deal also highlights how AI infrastructure financing is increasingly becoming a cross-industry effort. Chipmakers can face demand variability and supply constraints, while internet firms and cloud providers often need capital to plan capacity years ahead. Equity investment tied to AI buildout can reduce friction on timing and budgeting, even if the operational details are not fully spelled out publicly.

Naver is an internet platform company in South Korea, where AI infrastructure spending has surged amid rising demand for generative AI services and data-heavy applications. NVIDIA, whose core business is accelerating computing through GPUs and related AI software and networking platforms, has been expanding its partnerships with companies running large AI workloads.

Still, several specifics were not disclosed in the reported summary. The announcement, as carried by Yahoo Finance, does not provide in the excerpt any breakdown of how NVIDIA’s investment will be used (for example, land, power procurement, servers, or network equipment), any timetable for closing beyond a condition that it will occur once the deal closes, or any quantitative targets for the capacity being financed.

Neither did the report’s excerpt specify governance details tied to the stake, such as board representation, information rights, or constraints on future fundraising. It also did not clarify whether the investment is linked to a particular set of AI systems or whether Naver will be required to use NVIDIA hardware for the funded data-center capacity.

What to watch next is what the final transaction documents say once the deal is fully filed or finalized: the closing conditions, the exact use of proceeds for AI infrastructure, and any commercial arrangements that could determine how NVIDIA’s chips, networking, and software will fit into Naver’s data-center roadmap.