NHN soars nearly 12% on GPU project selection

(NHN)

Shares of NHN Corp. surged Tuesday morning after its cloud subsidiary was selected alongside Naver Cloud and Kakao Corp. as an operator for South Korea’s national GPU infrastructure project.

NHN was trading at 32,800 won ($23.6) as of 10:33 a.m., up 11.56 percent from the previous session on the Kospi.

The stock briefly jumped over 23 percent at market open.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced Monday that Naver Cloud, NHN Cloud, and Kakao were chosen to manage GPU resources secured through a 1.46 trillion won government initiative.

Coupang, another applicant, was not selected.

The secured GPUs include 10,080 units of Nvidia B200 and 3,056 units of H200 chips.

Of these, Naver Cloud will operate the 3,056 H200s, NHN Cloud will manage 7,656 B200s—the largest allocation—and Kakao will handle 2,424 B200s.

NHN‘s leading share of the GPUs raised investor expectations for potential upside.

Naver, in the meantime, was trading 0.85 percent lower at 233,500 won as of 10:34 a.m. while Kakao remained flat at 55,900 won.

Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics Co., which spiked the previous day on news of a large-scale supply deal with Tesla, fell 0.36 percent to 70,150 won as of 10:35 a.m.

The decline was attributed to profit-taking following a sharp rally.

Samsung announced Monday it had signed a 23 trillion won deal to supply AI chips to Tesla, pushing its share price above 70,000 won for the first time in 11 months.

Analysts noted that while the deal may not immediately boost earnings, it could mark a turning point for the company’s struggling foundry business.

Shares of NHN closed 4.76 percent higher at 30,800 won. Samsung Electronics finished at 70,600 won.