Naver Cloud Partners with NVIDIA to Build Southeast Asia Sovereign AI Within the Year

Kim Yuwon Participates as Speaker at NVIDIA GTC
"Actively Supporting Companies and Countries Seeking to Build Independent AI Capabilities"

Naver Cloud announced that it aims to create a successful case of building 'Sovereign Artificial Intelligence (AI)' targeting the Southeast Asian market within this year, in collaboration with NVIDIA.

Kim Yuwon, CEO of Naver Cloud, is giving a presentation on Sovereign AI at NVIDIA's annual event 'GTC 2025' on the 20th (local time). Photo by Naver Cloud

On the 20th (local time), Kim Yuwon, CEO of Naver Cloud, participated in NVIDIA's event 'GTC 2025' to strengthen cooperation with NVIDIA for building a sovereign AI ecosystem and expressed his ambition to achieve visible results in the Southeast Asian region within this year.

Sovereign AI refers to artificial intelligence that accumulates data on the information of the respective country and further consists of infrastructure and personnel with independent capabilities. If sovereign AI is not established, there is a concern that national technology and sensitive data could be exploited as training data for global AI models, causing security-related issues.

At the 'Sovereign AI Summit' session, CEO Kim introduced 'HyperCLOVA X,' which verified the potential of sovereign AI through a large language model (LLM) based on non-English languages, and presented Naver's unique AI value chain along with actual cases of sovereign AI construction.

He explained that Naver possesses capabilities across the entire AI value chain, including AI services, data, AI backbone, supercomputing infrastructure, cloud, and data centers. He emphasized that customized provision is possible according to the technological development stages of countries and companies seeking to secure sovereign AI.

Since forming a consensus between the two companies on building sovereign AI last year, Naver Cloud and NVIDIA are currently in discussions to establish actual business models.

In particular, targeting the Southeast Asian market, they are jointly discovering partners who can build sovereign AI locally in areas such as LLM, infrastructure, and applications (apps), with plans to create visible success cases within this year.

CEO Kim introduced the case of 'CLOVA Care Call,' an AI check-in call service supporting the care of elderly living alone, and the cases of NeuroCloud construction by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and the Bank of Korea, where AI was applied in security-critical national infrastructure industries.

CEO Kim stated, "To solve the problems faced by each country and company, independent AI capabilities and sovereign AI are necessary, and Naver will actively support these companies and countries," adding, "Not only companies like Naver that have experienced the entire AI value chain but also various companies constituting the AI value chain, including NVIDIA, must create an ecosystem and collaborate."