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On March 21st, 2025, NAVER Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won presented NAVER’s AI value chain, sovereign AI implementation cases, and plans for collaboration with NVIDIA at NVIDIA’s annual event, “GTC 2025,” held in San Jose, USA. The following summarizes the key points from the speech.

TEAM NAVER’s AI Value Chain Enables Sovereign AI

NAVER is at the forefront of expanding the ecosystem of sovereign AI that accurately understands the culture and language of each country and company around the world. For this, we have built the entire AI value chain—from its in-house developed large language model (LLM) HyperCLOVA X to supercomputers, data centers, and cloud. This value chain is essential for the development, operation and management of sovereign AI, forming a concrete vision of sovereign AI that will safeguard each country’s and company’s AI technological sovereignty and cultural identity.

We plan to release the next-generation model of HyperCLOVA X with enhanced inferencing capability in May this year. To ensure more efficient data training and stable operation of the model, we collaborated with NVIDIA and build a high-performance supercomputing platform.

The vast volumes of data required for sovereign AI is securely stored and managed at NAVER’s own hyperscale data centers, GAK, located in Chuncheon and Sejong, Korea. Furthermore, NAVER Cloud’s sovereign cloud and AI solutions—equipped with robust security capabilities—can be customized and applied across various industries that require sovereign AI.

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NAVER’s Sovereign AI Addresses Unique Challenges of Different Cultures

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What the AI industry needs today is the ability to solve real-life problems that are unique to each country’s environment and culture—going beyond R&D that merely prioritizes high performance. NAVER has already demonstrated that sovereign AI based on a language other than English can be established.

In 2021, NAVER launched CLOVA CareCall to tackle the societal challenge of a super-aged society in both Korea and Japan. CLOVA CareCall is an AI-powered service that regularly gives a call to elderly people living alone to check on each of their well-being, such as health, eating, and sleeping to detect any symptoms. After its launch in Korea, the service was introduced to Japan, where it also gained much traction.

The importance of sovereign AI is even more critical in high-security domains. In response, NAVER has developed AI platforms specialized for each institution in public and financial sectors. For instance, we collaborated with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP)—an organization operating under strict regulations and controlled environment—to implement a specialized model and a sovereign AI solution built on more than 40 years of internal data. In addition, we are working with the Bank of Korea—an institution with the highest security requirements—to develop an AI service specialized for finance based on HyperCLOVA X.

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NAVER’s AI Leadership Empowers Growth for Everyone

NAVER’s sovereign AI will become the key to address real-life challenges and core future competitiveness for countries and companies that lack the infrastructure to build their own AI. Leveraging the AI value chain that we have established early on, NAVER is demonstrating differentiated competitiveness across every aspect of sovereign AI. We will continue to drive innovation that pushes the boundaries of technology. At the same time, we will also take initiative in supporting more companies to grow through sovereign AI, leveraging our expertise and experience we have accumulated so far ●

► Want to know more about the competitiveness of NAVER’s sovereign AI? See more