Nvidia Corporation is making two major strategic moves this week to expand its foothold in artificial intelligence infrastructure, with a combined potential commitment reaching $600 billion. The chipmaker agreed to acquire $1 billion in newly issued shares of South Korea’s Naver Corp, and separately, entered talks to provide around $250 billion in financing guarantees for a massive OpenAI data center project in Ohio.
Naver investment and South Korean expansion
Naver shares surged over 8% on Monday after the internet company disclosed the $1 billion investment. The funds will help triple the size of an AI data center being developed in partnership with Brookfield, which will run on Nvidia’s computing hardware. The stock hit its highest level since June 22, sharply outperforming the KOSPI index’s 1% decline. Nvidia is also expanding a broader alliance with SK Group to build over 2 gigawatts of AI data center capacity across South Korea, a push expected to generate more than $500 billion in chip and supercomputer purchases. These deals underline Nvidia’s strategy to support sovereign AI capabilities and reduce reliance on a narrow set of hyperscale cloud customers.
OpenAI financing deal
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Nvidia is negotiating to backstop roughly $250 billion in lease and debt financing for a 10-gigawatt data center being developed by SoftBank’s energy subsidiary in southern Ohio. The total project cost, including chips, could surpass $500 billion. Nvidia is separately in talks to finance up to $350 billion in chip purchases for the facility, bringing its total potential exposure to $600 billion. OpenAI, which currently relies on Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle for compute, is the frontrunner to lease the site, although Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have also expressed interest. The U.S. government controls the power supply, with Japan funding a $33 billion natural gas plant under a trade deal.
The deal would lock in chip sales for years and give Nvidia deep demand visibility. However, analysts note that such interconnected funding arrangements could create risk if AI infrastructure growth slows. Nvidia’s stock slipped 0.92% on the news, while Oracle fell 4.21% and SoftBank dropped 3.07%.
The moves reflect CEO Jensen Huang’s accelerated push to build AI computing capacity globally, moving beyond cloud providers to directly finance infrastructure. For Naver and OpenAI, the partnerships provide the scale needed to compete in the next wave of AI development.
