[Market Focus] NHN Soars 20% on News of Ministry of Science and ICT GPU Project Selection

NHN is showing strong performance in early trading.

As of 9:04 a.m. on July 29, NHN was trading at 35,500 won, up 20.75% (6,100 won) from the previous day. At one point during the session, it soared to 36,200 won, marking a new 52-week high.

Investor sentiment appears to have been boosted by news that NHN, together with Naver and Kakao, will participate in the government's artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor graphics processing unit (GPU) procurement project.

The previous day, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced that it had selected Naver Cloud, NHN Cloud, and Kakao as participants in the GPU procurement project, which has a budget of 1.5 trillion won. The Ministry and these three companies plan to secure a total of approximately 13,000 GPUs, including 10,080 units of Nvidia B200 and 3,056 units of H200. Of these, NHN Cloud will be responsible for 7,656 units of Nvidia B200.

The Ministry plans to build a 'GPU Integrated Support Platform' with these companies and rapidly expand the domestic AI computing infrastructure to provide support to academia, industry, and research institutions as needed.