Naver is South Korea’s leading internet company, operating the country’s dominant search engine and a wide range of services. Founded in 1999, it became one of the relatively few non-US firms to train a large language model on the GPT-3 scale, unveiling its Korean-language model HyperCLOVA in 2021 with 82 billion parameters trained on a Korean-centric corpus.
Naver has positioned itself explicitly around sovereign AI, arguing that countries and companies should not depend solely on American or Chinese models for their core language technology, and has marketed its successor HyperCLOVA X model and AI infrastructure to governments and enterprises in Korea and abroad. Its scale in Korean search and content gave it the data and motivation to build models tuned to the Korean language rather than relying on English-dominated systems.
Why a business reader should care: Naver is a concrete example of a regional internet giant turning its home-market dominance into an AI strategy, and its sovereign-AI pitch foreshadowed a global wave of countries wanting models in their own language and under their own control.