Naver founder Lee Hae-jin met with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, in Taiwan to discuss collaboration on AI business ventures in Southeast Asia. This was his first overseas engagement after returning as chairman of the board.
According to the ICT industry on the 22nd, Chairman Lee, together with Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon and Naver Cloud CEO Kim Yoo-won, visited Taiwan, where ‘Computex 2025,’ Asia’s largest IT exhibition, was taking place.
Chairman Lee had a separate meeting with CEO Huang, who was also in Taiwan for the event. They reportedly discussed ways to collaborate on AI business ventures between Naver and NVIDIA in Southeast Asia. It is expected that when Naver jointly develops AI models with Southeast Asian IT companies, NVIDIA will provide GPUs for this collaboration.
An industry insider noted, “Naver is pursuing a Sovereign AI strategy, which involves establishing self-sufficient AI capabilities using each country’s infrastructure and data. This aligns with the interests of both companies, as it increases the demand for NVIDIA’s GPU chips.”
Last June, Chairman Lee also visited NVIDIA’s headquarters in the U.S. as Global Investment Officer (GIO) to discuss AI cooperation with CEO Huang. At that time, Naver mentioned, “Both companies have been pioneers in emphasizing the importance of Sovereign AI. This meeting aimed to seek synergies between NVIDIA, which provides hardware infrastructure for country-specific AI model development, and Naver’s AI technology, which possesses the core technologies to develop hyper-scale AI models ‘from scratch.'”
Chairman Lee also plans to visit Silicon Valley in the U.S. early next month. He intends to attend a local investment networking event and discuss the establishment of ‘Naver Ventures,’ a local investment corporation.