Nvidia (NVDA) will own more of Korean internet company Naver than its founder does

Naver told the Korea Exchange on Monday morning that it will sell 7,241,564 new shares to Nvidia (NVDA) at 204,500 won ($139 USD) each. The total is 1.4809 trillion won, close to $1.01 billion at Monday's rate of 1,468.5 won to the dollar. When the payment clears, Nvidia will own about 4.5% of the Korean company that runs the country's main search engine.

Naver shares closed at 225,000 won ($153 USD), up 8.43% on the day. Newsis reported the stock was up more than 13% at its high before it settled back.

What Naver is, for readers outside Korea

Naver is Korea's home grown search engine and web portal, and it is much more than a search engine. Lee Hae-jin started it in June 1999 and the company now runs the country's main web portal, its biggest shopping platform, a payments service called Naver Pay, the webtoon business that grew into Webtoon Entertainment, a maps app, a cloud arm and a streaming service. If you live in Korea you touch it several times a day without thinking about it, the same way an American touches Google.

The scale is real but smaller than people assume from that description. Naver reported 12.035 trillion won ($8.2B USD) of revenue for 2025, up 12.1%, and operating profit of 2.2081 trillion won ($1.5B USD), up 11.6%. Search brought in 4.1689 trillion won ($2.84B USD) of that, commerce 3.6884 trillion won ($2.51B USD), content 1.8992 trillion won ($1.29B USD) and fintech 1.6907 trillion won ($1.15B USD). The company had about 5,047 employees at the end of last year. It is one of the larger companies on the Kospi, though nowhere near the size of Samsung Electronics or SK Hynix.

Search is also where the pressure is. AI chat services are taking questions that used to go to an ordinary search box, in Korea the same as everywhere else, and Naver has been answering that by putting its own AI into search and shopping. That is the background to a company this size deciding to spend $10 billion on machines of its own.

Nvidia will own more of Naver than the man who founded it

The share register after this deal reads strangely. The National Pension Service stays the largest holder at 8.8%, BlackRock is second at 6.0%, and Nvidia arrives in third at about 4.5%. Lee Hae-jin, who founded Naver and chairs its board, is diluted to 3.8%. An American chip company will hold a bigger piece of Naver than its founder does.

This is also the first time Naver has sold shares to an outside party this way in 22 years, since 2004, four years before the company moved to the Kospi. Payment is due October 30 and the new shares are scheduled to list November 20, so nothing changes on the register until the autumn.

What the money is actually for

Lee announced the plan behind it on July 24 local time at the San Francisco AI Summit, three days before the filing landed in Seoul. Naver, Nvidia and the Canadian investment firm Brookfield are building what they call an AI factory at Naver's hyperscale data center campus in Sejong, the administrative city about 120 kilometers south of Seoul.

The headline number is $10 billion, near 14.63 trillion won. Nvidia's $1 billion is the equity piece. Brookfield signed a non binding letter of intent for up to $9 billion covering the GPU hardware, the buildings and the power, and Naver covers the rest itself. The build runs in stages, 55MW in the first half of 2027, then 200MW by 2028 holding somewhere near 100,000 GPUs, with a stated long term ambition of one full gigawatt. The chips are Nvidia's Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms.

Nvidia describes the project as sovereign AI infrastructure, which is a term worth explaining because Korean officials use it a lot now. It means computing capacity that sits inside the country, on domestic power and domestic land, so Korean companies training Korean language models do not have to rent time from data centers in another country. Naver runs HyperCLOVA X, its own family of Korean language models, and that is the argument for keeping the machines at home.

"With Nvidia's strategic investment plan and the infrastructure supply agreement with Brookfield, Naver's vision for the AI factory business has entered a real execution stage," Lee said. He also said something less corporate about why he wants his own machines. "The internet world Naver imagines is not a place ruled by one or two groups. Different AIs have to live together."

Naver rose on a day the market was selling everything else

Monday was not a calm session. Kospi opened 1.73% higher, fell as much as 1.99% during the day, then closed at 6,755.75, up 0.97%. Foreign investors sold a net 2.9039 trillion won ($1.98B USD) of Kospi stocks, most of it out of chip names, after China's CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%.

Naver went the other way. The same week that produced Samsung's more than $200 billion agreement with Broadcom and roughly $950 billion of Korean AI commitments signed in San Francisco has now added a second kind of deal, where the American money comes into a Korean company's share register instead of into a supply contract. That is a different thing, and the market treated it differently.

The other reason the stock moved

Two more things landed on Naver in the same few days. The company approved cancelling about 1.017 trillion won ($693M USD) of treasury shares effective August 3, which reduces the share count and partly answers the dilution from selling new stock to Nvidia.

Separately, the presidential Regulatory Rationalization Committee reviewed the Financial Services Commission's amended enforcement decree for the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information on July 24, and recommended it be softened. That decree, which takes effect August 20, would let regulators reject a change of major shareholder at a virtual asset company if the incoming owner has a record of breaking economic law. Naver was fined 200 million won ($136K USD) at first instance in September 2025 for a fair trade violation, which is exactly the kind of record the rule was written around, and Naver is trying to merge with Dunamu, the operator of the crypto exchange Upbit. The committee said treating every violation the same way, no matter how serious, is heavier than the rule needs to be. It is a recommendation and not a rewrite, so the final text is not settled.

What is not settled yet

Brookfield's $9 billion is a letter of intent and not a signed contract. The Nvidia payment does not clear until October 30. The 200MW target is 2028 and the gigawatt figure has no date attached to it at all. Naver has committed to a very large amount of construction on the strength of demand it expects to exist by then, and Korean chip investors already spent this month arguing about whether that demand holds.

What is settled is the share register. In November, if the payment clears on schedule, the company that makes the chips will be a top three owner of the company that buys them.

Sources

• NVIDIA Korea Blog (Korean language): Naver, NVIDIA and Brookfield expand Korea's national AI factory infrastructure
• Hankyung (Korean language): the 1.4809 trillion won third party allocation filing, share price, payment and listing dates
• Money Today (Korean language): Nvidia becomes third largest shareholder, stakes held by NPS, BlackRock and Lee Hae-jin
• Hankyung (Korean language): the 14 trillion won Naver, Nvidia and Brookfield alliance and the Sejong build
• Newsis (Korean language): Naver closes up 8.43%, intraday move and treasury share cancellation
• News1 (Korean language): Regulatory Rationalization Committee recommends easing the financial transaction decree
• Naver Corp press release (Korean language): 2025 annual revenue of 12.035 trillion won and the breakdown by business
• Our earlier coverage: CXMT's debut and the foreign selling in Seoul, Samsung's agreement with Broadcom, and what analysts expect from SK Hynix on July 29

Won figures are converted at 1,468.5 won to the dollar, the July 27, 2026 Seoul close. Quotes originally given in Korean are translated. This is not investment advice.