Naver's Lee Hae-jin and Nvidia's Jensen Huang Met in the US to Discuss Sovereign AI

From the left, Lee Hae-jin, Naver Global Investment Officer (GIO), Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and Choi Soo-yeon, Naver CEO

Lee Hae-jin, Naver's Global Investment Officer (GIO), met with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, to discuss the issue of country-specific artificial intelligence (AI) known as 'Sovereign AI.'

According to industry sources on the 27th, Lee GIO, Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon, Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yoo-won, and other key executives from Team Naver met with CEO Huang at NVIDIA headquarters on the 25th of this month to discuss the importance of various Sovereign AIs reflecting the cultures and values of each region, as well as plans for building AI models. Sovereign AI refers to the establishment of independent AI capabilities by countries or companies using their own infrastructure and data.

Naver explained, "Both companies have long emphasized the importance of Sovereign AI. This meeting was held to explore synergy between NVIDIA, which provides hardware infrastructure for building country-specific AI models, and Naver’s AI technology, which possesses foundational technology to develop large-scale AI models from the ground up."

Naver has a strategy to build AI models optimized for the cultures and languages of various regions worldwide based on the direction of Sovereign AI, using its own large language model (LLM) technology, and to provide diverse solutions based on this.

Naver holds foundational technology for building large-scale AI models based on languages other than English and Chinese. It is also recognized as a company with experience in establishing a cloud-based AI industry ecosystem.

Naver stated that during the meeting with CEO Huang, Lee GIO reiterated the necessity of Sovereign AI, and both companies agreed on the need for close collaboration among companies possessing relevant capabilities to spread Sovereign AI.

Building Sovereign AI is a large-scale project that requires data centers equipped with high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), power grids capable of running them, pipelines and ecosystems for data supply, and serving processes for actual service application. Therefore, close partnerships among major companies are essential.

Naver is continuously forming partnerships with local companies in regions such as Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, discussing cooperation in developing Sovereign Cloud and Sovereign AI optimized for the Middle East and Southeast Asia, thereby advancing the global expansion of its AI business.