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Photo = Naver |
[Alpha Biz= Kim Young Taek] Seoul, South Korea – May 23, 2025 – NAVER announced that its Executive Chairman Lee Hae-jin met with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on May 22 in Taipei to discuss a strategic collaboration to build sovereign AI infrastructure across Southeast Asia.
The meeting, attended by NAVER CEO Choi Soo-yeon and NAVER Cloud CEO Kim Yoo-won, marks a major step in NAVER’s global AI expansion strategy, following its ongoing Arabic-language LLM (Large Language Model) initiative in Saudi Arabia. The engagement took place in conjunction with COMPUTEX 2025, a leading global ICT trade show in Taiwan.
This collaboration aims to combine NAVER’s proprietary HyperCLOVA X LLM technology with NVIDIA’s cutting-edge GPU infrastructure, enabling the development of AI systems tailored to the languages, cultures, and data governance needs of Southeast Asian nations.
NAVER and NVIDIA’s partnership focuses on the concept of Sovereign AI – building LLMs optimized for specific countries' linguistic and cultural contexts, and establishing a fully localized AI value chain from data centers to end-user services.
To support this effort, NAVER Cloud signed an MOU with Siam AI Cloud, a Thai AI and cloud platform company, to co-develop a Thai language LLM and AI agents optimized for local applications. The companies plan to launch a tourism-focused AI agent by the end of this year and later expand into healthcare, public services, and academia with a diverse range of LLM models.
This is part of Chairman Lee’s broader vision to spearhead NAVER’s "AI ascent" on the global stage, especially following his return to the board of directors in March after a seven-year hiatus.
Earlier in March, NAVER Cloud presented its Sovereign AI strategy and deployment experience at NVIDIA’s GTC 2025 in San Jose, further solidifying the partnership foundation between the two tech giants.
Alphabiz 김영택 기자(sitory0103@alphabiz.co.kr)
