South Korea backs Naver data centre

South Korea will lend Naver 400 billion won at low interest to expand an artificial intelligence data center and add more graphics processing unit servers. (chosun.com) The Financial Services Commission said on April 15 that the National Growth Fund approved the financing for Naver’s Sejong project at its fund management deliberation committee. ChosunBiz reported the loan rate would be in the 3% range. (biz.chosun.com) The project covers expansion of Naver’s Sejong data center and installation of newer graphics processing units, the chips used to train and run large artificial intelligence models. The government said the money is meant to support Naver’s Korean-language model work and wider artificial intelligence use in search. (biz.chosun.com) A data center is the physical backbone behind artificial intelligence: rows of servers, power systems and cooling equipment that let companies train models and answer user requests. South Korea has been pushing to build more of that stack at home rather than rely only on foreign cloud and model providers. (navercloudcorp.com, msit.go.kr) That push has been formalized in the government’s “Sovereign AI Foundation Model” program, which selected Naver Cloud, Upstage, SK Telecom, NC AI and LG AI Research as competing teams. The Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology said the goal is to reduce technological and economic dependence on global artificial intelligence models and place Korea among the top three artificial intelligence powers. (msit.go.kr, english.msit.go.kr) The Naver loan follows another National Growth Fund decision on March 26 to put 250 billion won directly into Rebellions, a domestic artificial intelligence chip designer. That Rebellions round totaled 600 billion won when Korea Development Bank and private investors were included. (fsc.go.kr, chosun.com) Those two decisions line up with a broader state financing plan. The Financial Services Commission has said the National Growth Fund is a five-year program worth more than 150 trillion won for advanced industries. (fsc.go.kr, fsc.go.kr) Naver already markets Gak Sejong as a hyperscale facility, and its English-language materials say the site spans about 290,000 square meters and can house more than 60,000 servers. Company materials also say construction was completed in September 2023. (navercloudcorp.com, navercloudcorp.com) The immediate next step is build-out: more server capacity, more graphics processing units and more model training at Sejong. South Korea is now using public money to back each layer of that chain, from chips to data centers to foundation models. (biz.chosun.com, fsc.go.kr, english.msit.go.kr)