Naver Signs $9bn Brookfield Compute Deal

Naver, South Korea’s largest internet company, has signed a contract under which a Brookfield fund will put up as much as $9bn for GPUs and data centres that Naver’s cloud arm will rent. In two regulatory filings on 27 October, Naver also said it will guarantee its cloud unit’s payments under the deal, a commitment it puts at up to 18.74 trillion won, about 65% of Naver’s equity.

The contract matters beyond Naver because it was the condition attached to Nvidia’s planned $1bn investment in the company. Naver said on Tuesday that the condition had now been met, Yonhap and The Korea Herald reported, and that it would complete the share issue to Nvidia as soon as possible.

In brief

Naver and Naver Cloud signed an investment and operating agreement with Green Holding L.P., a vehicle of the Brookfield AI Infrastructure Fund.
A Brookfield-funded company, provisionally called Asset Co., will buy up to $9bn of compute and rent it to Naver Cloud as a service.
Naver is guaranteeing up to 18.74 trillion won of Naver Cloud’s payments to the end of 2034; it says nothing is yet payable.
Securing at least $9bn of compute was the precondition for Nvidia’s $1bn share purchase, due by 30 October.

Brookfield pays for the GPUs and Naver Cloud rents them

According to the filings, Naver and Naver Cloud signed the agreement with Green Holding L.P., a special purpose vehicle of the Brookfield AI Infrastructure Fund. Brookfield will use it to set up a Korean investment company and then Asset Co., which it will fund entirely. Asset Co. will buy the hardware and supply GPU computing to Naver Cloud as a service, and Naver Cloud will sell AI data centre capacity on to its own customers. The GPU supply contract and a contract for Naver Cloud to operate the GPUs for Asset Co. are still to be signed.

There is an accounting twist. Although Brookfield’s vehicle will own all of Asset Co., Naver says that under the agreement and Korean accounting rules it will control the company, so Asset Co. will be consolidated as a Naver subsidiary.

The $9bn was first announced in July. Brookfield’s release at the time said it “plans to fund up to $9 billion for AI infrastructure”, with Nvidia investing $1bn in Naver and Naver funding the rest. “As AI adoption accelerates across the global economy, access to trusted, sovereign and scalable AI infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important strategic priority for companies and countries,” said Sikander Rashid, Brookfield’s global head of AI infrastructure. Brookfield has not issued a new statement on the signing.

Nvidia’s $1bn share purchase was waiting on this contract

Naver’s July filing on the share issue sets out the condition plainly: the issue requires Naver to secure computing infrastructure worth at least $9bn for its AI factory business, not counting the money raised from Nvidia. The filing lists 7,241,564 new shares at 204,500 won each, a provisional count that will be fixed by the exchange rate shortly before payment. The payment date is 30 October and the new shares are due to list on 20 November, though both are maximum deadlines that can be extended.

The project’s first site is Naver’s Gak Sejong data centre, using Nvidia’s DSX design for AI factories. Naver’s targets, which the filing calls provisional, are 55 megawatts in the first half of 2027, 100 MW in total by the end of 2027 and 200 MW by 2028, with gigawatt-scale capacity as the long-term aim. Naver says the specific timetable is still being negotiated. Brookfield’s July release said the 200 MW site is expected to use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Blackwell platforms.

The guarantee is twelve times Naver Cloud’s annual revenue

The headline figure is Brookfield’s $9bn, but the number that tells you who carries the risk is Naver’s guarantee. The 18.74 trillion won is the face value of everything Naver Cloud would pay Asset Co. if the full $9bn is spent and every contract runs to its longest term. Naver Cloud’s revenue last year was about 1.55 trillion won, according to the filing, so the guarantee is roughly twelve times its annual sales. Naver says no payment obligation has been fixed yet, that GPUs will be bought in batches to match demand, and that each batch is paid for over six years from the day it is supplied. The guarantee also covers damages and penalties, which the filing leaves out of the total because they cannot yet be calculated.

That is the trade in this kind of deal. Brookfield’s money keeps up to $9bn of GPU spending off Naver’s own capital budget, a model other AI infrastructure builders also use. But Naver keeps the duty to pay if the customers never arrive, and because it will consolidate Asset Co., the assets and liabilities may still appear in its group accounts. Naver said, as quoted by the Herald, that the guarantee “does not in itself translate into actual cash outflows or cost burdens”, which holds only as long as demand for the capacity does.

Brookfield, which is also part of a green data centre tie-up in Japan, gets a long-dated, parent-guaranteed income stream. Naver Cloud already has partners lined up to sell capacity, including FPT in Vietnam. The next marker is Friday: if Nvidia’s $1bn arrives by 30 October, Naver is expected to refile the final share count.