Naver announces groundbreaking Nvidia partnership on sovereign AI for East Asia

Naver Cloud announced that it partnered with Nvidia in a first-of-its-kind deal to create a localized AI system for the East Asian market.

Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won announces a partnership with Nvidia at Nvidia's GTC 2025 event held in San Jose, California. [NAVER CLOUD]

Korean cloud service provider Naver Cloud has partnered with AI chip giant Nvidia to establish a localized AI system targeting the East Asian market and expects to deliver “tangible results” within the year.

The announcement was made at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 in San Jose, California, during a keynote speech by Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won on Thursday.

It is the first kind of partnership formally announced by the cloud subsidiary of Korea’s largest portal site and Nvidia, which has been hinted at since Naver founder Lee Hae-jin and CEO Choi Soo-yeon met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in June 2024.

Kim showcased Naver’s AI model HyperClova X, which leverages non-English languages, and emphasized that the tech company possesses the entire AI value chain from service to data, cloud and computing infrastructures, and would be able to tailor the technologies by country or company desiring sovereign AI — a nation’s capabilities to develop and run AI systems that suit its social and cultural environment without having to rely on foreign resources.

The technology is now able to address societal issues, according to Kim, demonstrating the AI call service “Clova CareCall,” in which AI manages health care for older people, and Neurocloud, a private AI system utilized by security-sensitive sectors such as finance and nuclear power.

Naver Cloud and Nvidia are closely cooperating to build a sovereign AI system and related business models for the East Asian regions. The duo is at the stage of forming local partnerships to support AI development such as large language models, infrastructure and applications.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]