South Korean cloud provider Naver has confirmed that it will expand its Sejong data center to 200MW.

Naver announced in early June that it would deploy 55MW of Nvidia hardware as part of a sovereign AI push utilizing Nvidia’s DSX platform, with an aim to expand to 100MW within 2027 and 200MW by 2028.

This expansion was officially confirmed on Friday, 24 July.

It will be backed by up to $10 billion in funding, with up to $9 billion coming from Canadian investment management company Brookfield and $1 billion coming from Nvidia.

Nvidia has used similar financing structures – which have attracted controversy for their cyclical nature – to fund the data center buildout in the US.

This is conditional on Naver finalizing “at least $9bn of committed financing for the project, separate from Nvidia’s planned investment.”

The announcement was made on the same day as an AI summit in San Francisco, which was attended by South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, Samsung chairman Lee Jae Yong, OpenAI head Sam Altman, and others.

Naver has also said that it intends to expand its deployment of Nvidia chips to 1GW.

The same summit also saw Samsung Electronics and Broadcom sign a memorandum of understanding to collaborate further on memory and foundry technologies to the tune of more than $200bn.

Naver currently lists six cloud regions in South Korea, as well as one each in Japan, Germany, Singapore, and the US (West Coast). It is also planning future regions in the US (East Coast), Vietnam, Taiwan, and Thailand, and is expanding into the Middle East and North Africa.

The company’s Sejong site began construction in November 2023. The site spans 290,000 sqm (3.1 million sq ft) and is planned to reach 270MW of capacity, hosting up to 600,000 servers running Naver's cloud services. Work on the second and third phases is ongoing.