Naver Cloud has confirmed completion of a paid sovereign AI (artificial intelligence) project with Thailand at the end of last year. This marks the first actual paid project following the formalization of efforts to target sovereign AI in Southeast Asia. The focus of Team Naver's overseas AI business has shifted to Thailand and Saudi Arabia, where results have been confirmed. Cooperation with the Philippines and Indonesia is understood to have no follow-up collaboration after the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding).
According to the IT industry on the 12th, Naver Cloud completed the "Thai Sovereign AI Model Development and Tourism-Specialized AI Agent Development" project with Thailand's Siam AI at the end of last year. The developed Thai-specialized model was released as open source.
Naver Cloud concretized its strategy to target sovereign AI in Southeast Asia at NVIDIA's annual developer event "GTC 2025" held in San Jose, USA, in March last year. At that time, the company announced it would identify partners with NVIDIA to jointly create LLMs (large language models), infrastructure, and apps locally, and achieve visible success cases within the year.
There were three cooperation cases with Southeast Asia that were made public. Naver Cloud cooperated with Indonesia's Telkom and Cisco in March 2023, and signed an MOU with Philippines' Converge ICT in May 2024. In May 2025, it announced plans to develop a Thai-specialized LLM and tourism AI agent with Thailand's Siam AI.
The Thailand project yielded results, while the projects in the Philippines and Indonesia saw no progress. Naver Cloud stated, "After the MOU, both parties' business directions and business priorities changed individually, so there is currently no ongoing collaboration." This is interpreted as a choice and concentration strategy to gather resources in markets where results are emerging rather than expanding agreements en masse.
The center of overseas AI business remains Saudi Arabia. After winning the contract for the digital twin platform construction project with Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing in 2023, Naver completed the construction of three cities—Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah—in June last year. In May last year, it established a local joint venture "Naver Innovation," and signed the definitive contract for Phase 2 of the digital twin project this past May.
The adoption of Saudi Arabia's "Digital Twin Platform National Standard" has not yet been finalized. Naver Cloud explained, "It is currently under review for adoption as a national standard by the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing." The scale of the Phase 2 definitive contract and the completion timeline for Riyadh and Dammam construction were not disclosed.
Regarding the 2nd billion riyal (approximately 70 billion won) project announced by Saudi state-owned housing company NHC as a project to be executed by Naver Innovation, it stated, "We understand it as the overall project scale including digital twin," drawing a line between this and confirmed contract amounts.
Plans derived from Saudi Arabia have yet to yield follow-up results. The Arabic LLM joint development MOU signed with Rebellion in February 2025 is also understood to have no further progress. The Morocco AI data center project, which aimed to build a Phase 1 40MW (megawatt) facility within 2025, has not progressed either.
Naver Cloud's collaboration tools are achieving notable results in the Asian region. A prime example is "LINE Works," a business collaboration tool officially launched in Taiwan last October. The company stated, "Taiwanese local enterprises have successfully adopted LINE Works, with over 100 companies confirming their adoption."
LINE Works is the number one service in Japan's paid business chat market for eight consecutive years, and Taiwan is the second global market after Japan. LINE is known as a "national messenger" in Taiwan, used monthly by about 95% of the population. Naver Cloud initially established LINE Works in Taiwan by leveraging LINE integration, design reflecting local personal information protection laws, and payment in New Taiwan dollars, and now aims to expand into the Southeast Asian market. Thailand is the next candidate. Thailand's LINE monthly users number 54 million, second only to Japan (100 million).
LINE Works is a platform expanding beyond simple collaboration tools into AI. The operator LINE Works Co., Ltd. integrated LINE's AI business "LINE Clova" in 2023, and the AI phone response service "AiCall" rose to number one in Japan's voice bot market (ITR survey).
Meanwhile, Naver revealed plans during its second-quarter earnings announcement to build a Phase 1 200MW-scale AI factory based on the Sejong data center to meet sovereign AI demand in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Naver Cloud explains that the essence of sovereign AI lies not only in data location but also in the capability to build, operate, and control AI that aligns with each country's language, culture, systems, and regulations.
The industry expects that Naver Cloud's overseas AI business, which has built references centered on Saudi Arabia and Thailand, will lead to customer acquisition for the Sejong AI factory and translate into actual sales.
in TECH
