Naver founder discusses Sovereign AI issues with Nvidia CEO

[Photo provided by Naver Corp.]

Lee Hae-jin, founder and global investment officer (GIO) of South Korea’s tech giant Naver Corp., recently met with Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest semiconductor company, and discussed issues related to Sovereign AI, which ensures data sovereignty for different countries.

The meeting is seen as part of Naver’s strategy to establish a global presence through collaboration with Nvidia, a leader in the AI semiconductor industry, by leveraging its proprietary generative AI model, HyperCLOVA X, to build a Naver AI ecosystem.

According to sources from the information and communication technology (ICT) industry on Thursday, Naver said in a post on its official Instagram account that Lee, along with Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon, Naver Cloud Corp. CEO Kim Yoo-won, and other key executives met with Huang at Nvidia‘s headquarters in California, the United States on Tuesday (local time).

They discussed the importance of various Sovereign AI models that reflect the culture and values of different regions and how to build relevant, according to the post.

Naver is currently pursuing a strategy to build AI models optimized for the languages and cultures of various regions under the broad direction of Sovereign AI, using its proprietary large-scale language model (LLM) technology.

Naver plans to provide various solutions and services based on these models.

“Both companies have long recognized the importance of Sovereign AI and this meeting was held to explore synergies between Nvidia, which provides the hardware infrastructure for building national AI models, and Naver, which possesses the core technology to develop super-large AI models from scratch,” said an official from Naver.

Naver is the only company in the world that has the core technology to build super-large AI models based on languages other than English and Chinese. It also has the experience to create a cloud-based AI industry ecosystem using the technology.

During the meeting, Naver and Nvidia agreed on the need for close collaboration among capable firms to promote the spread of Sovereign AI, according to the Naver official.