Naver and Brookfield agree on $9 billion AI infrastructure plan

Naver said the Brookfield agreement is worth $9 billion and will secure computing infrastructure; the value is also reported as approximately 12 trillion Korean won.[1] Brookfield plans to establish a special purpose vehicle tentatively named Asset Co., with up to $9 billion invested through that vehicle.[3] The planned infrastructure investment covers GPUs and data centers.[3] Asset Co. will supply computing resources to Naver Cloud, which is set to operate the infrastructure.[3] That division of responsibilities gives professionals a concrete distinction to track: the investment vehicle supplies resources, while Naver Cloud operates the system.

Naver said the Brookfield agreement fulfills a precondition for NVIDIA’s strategic equity investment.[1] The planned investment is $1 billion, or about 1.5 trillion won, and NVIDIA is set to become Naver’s third-largest shareholder after a third-party paid-in capital allocation is finalized.[2][1] These terms describe a planned investment and a future shareholder position, not a completed transaction. The agreement also sits within a 1-gigawatt-scale global AI Factory initiative involving Naver, NVIDIA and Brookfield.[3] The factory is designed to use large-scale computing resources for AI model training and inference.[3]

The companies plan to begin operations at 55 megawatts in the first half of 2027, then expand capacity to 200 megawatts by 2028.[3] Gak Sejong is expected to serve as a key hub for sequential entry into overseas markets; it began operating in November 2023.[3] Naver and Naver Cloud will lead the project, drawing on their experience managing GPU clusters and data centers.[3] Brookfield had announced in July that it would invest up to $9 billion in the AI Factory project.[1]