Naver's executives, participating in President Lee Jae-myung's visit to France, proposed collaboration on an artificial intelligence (AI) factory targeting the European market. They also announced plans to boost investments in industry-specific AI, webtoons, and video content.
Naver revealed on the 9th that CEO Cho Su-yeon and Kim Yu-won, head of Naver Cloud, met with local corporate CEOs during the presidential visit. They actively explored collaboration opportunities in AI infrastructure, industry-specific AI, and content sectors.
Notably, CEO Cho presented three potential areas for cooperation—global AI infrastructure, industry-specific AI with data sovereignty and security, and cultural content—at the Korea-France Business Roundtable on the 8th (local time).
Referring to Naver's recent announcement of a global AI factory project (over 1GW scale) with NVIDIA and Brookfield, CEO Cho stated, “We want to combine France's stable energy infrastructure with Naver's AI ecosystem expertise to build an AI factory for European companies and startups.”
In the industry-specific AI sector, Naver introduced cases like the Bank of Korea's financial AI 'BOKI' and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power's nuclear-specific AI 'Hy-NuRI.' CEO Cho proposed supporting French companies and institutions in developing industry-specific AI by leveraging Naver's experience in integrating AI with industry data and expertise.
For content, Naver highlighted the success of Naver Webtoon, which has released over 70 original works in France and secured more than 2 million readers. CEO Cho expressed, “We aim to collaborate so that creators from both countries can produce works that reach global audiences, leveraging our global webtoon platform and AI copyright protection technology 'Toon Radar.'”
On the previous day, the 7th (local time), CEO Cho attended the Lumiere Summit, an international film and video summit, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France.
There, Naver introduced the $100 million global content fund 'IP Adaptation Fund,' established by Naver and Webtoon Entertainment. Naver plans to invest in expanding creators' intellectual property (IP) into films, animations, and games.
As part of this visit, Naver also signed a strategic memorandum of understanding (MOU) with France's National Audiovisual Institute (INA) to combine AI technology with audiovisual cultural heritage archives. Both sides will jointly explore ways to analyze and organize content using Naver's AI technology on INA's audiovisual archives, enabling users to search for and utilize necessary materials.
Naver has been using France as a hub for AI research and investment in Europe. Naver Labs Europe in Grenoble, France, researches cutting-edge technologies like robotics AI and multimodal foundation models. The company continues to collaborate with Mistral AI, an AI company it invested in 2024, in the field of manufacturing-specific sovereign AI.
