Jensen Huang appears on Naver's streaming service, pledges to expand partnership and build massive AI cloud

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin on a live broadcast of Naver's streaming service Chijichik on Sunday, cementing what both sides called an "AI infrastructure alliance" and pledging to build large-scale AI cloud infrastructure in South Korea and around the world.

"The partnership between Nvidia and Naver has been a very important asset to me for a long time," Huang said during the broadcast, which drew more than 57,000 concurrent viewers. "We will expand our partnership and build a massive AI cloud in Korea and across the globe."

Lee also spoke to the depth of the two companies' ties. "Naver was the first company in Asia to adopt Nvidia's GPUs and build a SuperPod," he said. "We have worked together based on a blueprint for a future partnership that Jensen Huang himself sketched out on a whiteboard. It is truly an honor to welcome Jensen Huang CEO, who leads the IT industry and whom I have always deeply admired, to Naver."

Huang also praised the Chijichik platform, marveling at the speed of the live chat. "It's incredibly fast," he said, watching messages scroll by. "Only Koreans could read at this speed."

Commenting on the esports arena set up on the Chijichik stage, Huang credited South Korea with bringing the sport to the world. "Korea is the birthplace of esports, and thanks to Korea, the whole world has come to love it," he said. "Gaming is not just play — it demands strategy, resource management and teamwork." He added that those qualities map directly onto what it takes to run a company, saying an esports champion would have every quality needed to be a great CEO.

After the broadcast, Huang and Lee sat down with their respective management teams to discuss concrete areas of cooperation.

After his meeting with Naver's leadership, Huang spoke to reporters and laid out the specifics of the partnership. The three pillars are an AI Frontier Lab partnership, AI cloud development and physical AI.

On the first front, Huang said Nvidia would team up with Naver as part of the "Nemotron Coalition" to build open frontier AI models, drawing on the world-class expertise of Naver's AI team.

On AI cloud cooperation, Huang said the two companies would build a 200-megawatt AI factory targeting the global market. "If this is realized, Naver will become a company 10 times larger than it is today," he said, adding that the facility would ultimately be scaled up to one gigawatt.

Naver announced Sunday that it would partner with Nvidia to enter the gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure race dominated by global big tech. The centerpiece is a jointly built global AI factory more than four times the size of Gak Sejong, South Korea's largest hyperscale data center. The alliance is designed to extend AI infrastructure links beyond the Asia-Pacific region to the Middle East and Europe.

Huang described physical AI as an area where South Korea holds a competitive edge. "Over the past decade, watching Korea's progress, I have come to feel that physical AI is genuinely competitive here," he said. He pointed to Naver's long track record in robotics, noting that a robot had just served him an iced coffee upstairs. "It felt like a dream," he said. "That is what the company of the future looks like."