It was recently confirmed that Naver (NAVER) has invested in Anthropic, known for its generative AI 'Claude'. While the exact investment amount remains undisclosed, it is reported to be a relatively small sum given that the investment was made indirectly.
According to industry sources on the 10th, Naver's U.S. investment subsidiary, Naver Ventures, invested in Anthropic at the end of last year. The investment was conducted through an indirect channel via a U.S. venture capital (VC) fund, which is why it had not been previously disclosed to the market.
Naver Ventures is a corporate venture capital (CVC) firm established in San Francisco, U.S., in June last year. Its primary role is to identify and invest in startups in Silicon Valley. As of June this year, Naver Ventures has directly invested in nine startups over approximately one year and separately contributed to three VC funds. Companies receiving direct investment include AI firm Twelve Labs, voice AI company ElevenLabs, and an AI data infrastructure firm. The current investment in Anthropic is believed to have been made through one of the three venture funds to which Naver Ventures contributed.
Industry observers expect this investment to foster continued collaboration between Naver and Anthropic. In June, executives from Anthropic's platform engineering and product divisions visited Seongnam Naver 1784 in Gyeonggi Province to share AI agent technologies. Later that same month, Naver introduced Anthropic's AI coding agent 'Claude Code' into its engineering organization.
Naver is also jointly building an AI factory with NVIDIA. The project aims to reach a final capacity of 1 gigawatt (GW), starting with 100 megawatts (MW) next year and expanding to 200 MW by 2028. Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver, stated during the second-quarter earnings conference call on the 7th that "the global demand for AI computing will continue to grow due to the spread of generative AI, industry-wide AI transformation (AX), and AI agents." He added, "While there are concerns that usage may decline with the emergence of low-cost, high-efficiency models, lower per-operation costs will instead drive the expansion of AX and AI agents, thereby boosting overall computing demand."
in TECH
