Cassidy: Korea’s AI buildout just moved past the blueprint stage.
Cassidy: Now comes the expensive part: making all that capacity useful.
Cassidy: Before today’s development
Cassidy: some context: NAVER NVIDIA
Cassidy: and Brookfield are building Korea’s sovereign AI infrastructure at NAVER’s GAK Sejong hyperscale data center.
Cassidy: The partners expanded an initial 55 MW plan to 200 MW by 2028.
Cassidy: NVIDIA plans a $1 billion investment, Brookfield up to $9 billion, and NAVER has framed the broader ambition as up to 1 GW.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Korea has three major compute builds moving at once.
Bill: We’re asking who gets affordable access when the doors finally open.
Bill: For updates on this story — NAVER-NVIDIA Korea AI factory expansion — tap follow so the next episode lands in your feed.
Cassidy: Here's The Asia Business Daily:
Quote: The key infrastructure that will determine the competitiveness of South Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) industry
Quote: the National AI Computing Center (KOACC)
Quote: was launched with a spectacular fireworks show in Haenam
Quote: Jeonnam. The government and private sector are investing a total of 2.4 trillion won in capital
Quote: with plans to establish Haenam Solar City as a global AI hub.
Bill: Haenam has gone from a 2.4 trillion won ambition to an actual construction site.
Bill: KOACC’s first design is 40 megawatts, expandable to 80, giving founders a 2028 date they can finally plan workloads around.
Cassidy: Fireworks at a data-center groundbreaking is certainly a choice.
Cassidy: But having Samsung SDS
Cassidy: Naver and the science ministry on that stage says Seoul sees this as national industrial policy
Cassidy: not a regional server farm.
Bill: Putting it beside the Gwangju semiconductor complex makes sense.
Bill: Keeping compute close to chips is the strategy.
Bill: Now somebody needs to publish what an inference job in Haenam will cost versus AWS in 2028.
Cassidy: Korea is building a real stack here—power, compute, semiconductor adjacency, and public capital.
Cassidy: The hard part comes after the ribbon-cutting: keeping that capacity busy enough to justify 2.4 trillion won.
Cassidy: Edaily, with Lee So-Hyun:
Quote: The detailed project structure for the gigawatt (GW)-class AI infrastructure plan, first unveiled last June, has now been revealed.
Quote: Naver plans to secure a stable supply of graphics processing units (GPUs) through its equity partnership with NVIDIA and reduce the
Quote: financial burden associated with large-scale facility investments by leveraging Brookfield’s investment structure.
Bill: Following up on NAVER’s Korea AI factory buildout: the first 200-megawatt phase now has a financing and operating structure.
Bill: Honestly, this is the first deal this week where somebody seems to have made the economics work.
Cassidy: Nvidia puts in $1 billion of equity.
Cassidy: Brookfield can put up to $9 billion into an SPV that owns the GPUs and facility, while Naver’s operating subsidiary pays by usage.
Cassidy: A regulatory filing is a lot more useful than a heroic render and a gigawatt headline.
Bill: It transfers risk in a sensible direction: Brookfield owns the hard assets
Bill: Naver sells compute and Nvidia has skin in the supply relationship.
Bill: But 200 megawatts is still a giant tab—show founders what a million inference tokens costs on this thing, then we can celebrate.
Cassidy: Korea’s buildout is no longer a one-national-center story.
Cassidy: We just covered Haenam; now Naver has a documented 200-megawatt commercial structure.
Cassidy: Capacity is coming from several directions at once.
Cassidy: From Huda Ata at Gulf News:
Quote: The expansion will see Aleria deploy up to 16,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units (GPUs) in the United States
Quote: alongside 28 racks of next-generation Nvidia DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 systems in the UAE
Quote: marking one of the first deployments of the platform in the region.
Bill: Aleria gets credit for saying what most of these announcements dodge: this is already running.
Bill: Eight thousand six hundred forty Blackwell Ultra GPUs are in a 25-megawatt U.S.
Bill: facility, scaling toward 16,000.
Bill: Those are deployment details you can test.
Cassidy: And 28 DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 racks in the UAE, among the region’s first.
Cassidy: “Sovereign” means the data and facility sit under local control; the compute roadmap still arrives on Nvidia’s timetable.
Bill: Right. Aleria has a serious stack: DDN storage paired with Nvidia accelerated compute for sensitive government workloads.
Bill: But when a founder asks what an inference job costs there versus a hyperscaler, the sovereign pitch has to meet production.
Cassidy: We just had Korea’s financing blueprint.
Cassidy: Aleria is a useful parallel because it has named hardware and live sites on two continents.
Cassidy: Capacity projections are plentiful.
Cassidy: Operational racks are a better kind of fact.
Cassidy: From Paige Gross at CIO Dive:
Quote: Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached $143 billion in the second quarter of 2026
Quote: up from $100 billion in the previous quarter
Quote: according to Synergy Research Group data.
Quote: The year-over-year growth rate notched the 11th consecutive growth quarter jumping 43% — the highest growth rate in the last eight years
Quote: the market analyst group found.
Cassidy: Synergy puts Q2 cloud-infrastructure spend at $143 billion, up 43% year over year—the fastest growth rate in eight years.
Cassidy: That puts a demand curve behind Amazon’s AI spending binge, not just an earnings-call adjective.
Bill: AWS still has 28% of this market, ahead of Azure at 20 and Google at 15.
Bill: Fine. But businesses deploying agents need usable throughput at a price that survives a month-end bill, not another glossy capacity chart.
Cassidy: Gen-AI cloud services are growing 165%, according to Synergy.
Cassidy: That $500 billion annual cloud-spend figure explains why every board and government ministry suddenly has a data-center plan.
Bill: Demand is clearly there.
Bill: The next test is whether AWS and everyone building alongside it can turn that demand into cheaper inference
Bill: rather than just pricier waiting rooms.
Cassidy: Mingtiandi writes:
Quote: The board of LG Uplus on 29 July approved KRW 1.3 trillion ($895.6 million) in funding for the second phase of its Paju AI Data Centre
Quote: according to a filing with South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service
Quote: with the investment representing a follow up to the KRW 615.6 billion which LG committed to the first phase in May 2025.
Cassidy: LG Uplus’ board approved another $895.6 million for Paju on July 29—200 megawatts, liquid cooling, eventually 100,000-plus servers.
Cassidy: After Haenam and Naver, Korea’s buildout has three separate institutions moving capital at once.
Cassidy: It’s moved into coordinated spending.
Bill: LG’s phase-one check was KRW 615.6 billion; this new KRW 1.3 trillion commitment is more than double that.
Bill: So yes, Paju is getting real.
Bill: But a 200-megawatt campus 31 kilometers north of Seoul still needs to tell founders what an inference job costs there versus AWS or Naver in
Bill: 2028.
Cassidy: The timing is revealing: LG approved the money the same day Seoul launched the AIDC Alliance, targeting 18.4 gigawatts by 2035.
Cassidy: The alliance includes Samsung SDS and SK, plus Kakao and FuriosaAI.
Cassidy: It’s a corporate coalition with government scale behind it, and LG Electronics is supplying the cooling inside its own group.
Bill: Eighteen-point-four gigawatts is a handsome target.
Bill: Paju’s 200 megawatts and an actual board authorization are what I can put on a spreadsheet.
Bill: Now show the utilization and the pricing.
Cassidy: For more on AI’s impact in government and defense
Cassidy: try Anthropic Pentagon Watch
Cassidy: a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude
Cassidy: military AI use autonomous weapons
Cassidy: and procurement blacklisting.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you get podcasts.
Cassidy: We’re watching the National AI Computing Center in Haenam, which is planned to begin operations in 2028.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes, so check out the pieces that caught your attention.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.