Home > Business > Tech

Naver's Sejong Gak data center to scale GPU services

Published: 28 Oct. 2025, 16:11 Updated: 29 Oct. 2025, 14:44

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

A view of the server room at Naver's Gak Sejong data center [NAVER]

SEJONG — At the control center of Naver’s Gak data center, massive screens display all kinds of graphs and numbers to verify that the data center behind Korea’s largest search engine is working properly. But amid all the professionals staring at their six-monitor setups and staff members busily running around sharing important documents, something felt out of place: the two live TV broadcast streams showing Korean and international news at the top right corner of this enormous display.

In addition to all the data supplied by the charts and graphs, the two live TV channels act as a quick visual indicator for engineers to see if anything is going on in the outside world that could spike the data center's usage.

This type of thinking is part of how one of the country's largest data centers — located in an area that is 41 times the size of a football field and is expected to house 600,000 server units when completed — ensures it can securely operate, even in extreme situations.

Naver Cloud, Naver's IT platform subsidiary that operates the Gak data center, also hopes to rent the hyperscale AI facility to third-party clients in the form of GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS).

A view of the control room of Naver's Gak Sejong data center in Sejong [NAVER]

However, right now, while the company lends out its power to local firms and institutions, Gak Sejong is currently used exclusively by Naver's services.

Naver emphasized that the key to operating a data center is to be able to react to any outside factor, from a sudden increase in search queries that can overload servers to natural disasters that would impact connectivity.

The importance of a secure data center has been demonstrated many times over in recent years, such as when KakaoTalk and most of its services went down in October 2022 after a fire in SK C&C’s internet data center in Panggyo, Gyeonggi.

“Data centers must provide stable service regardless of external environmental factors, so we designed and built both the Chuncheon and [Sejong] data centers to be ready for any natural disasters that we can think of,” Naver’s data center director, Roh Sang-min, said during Monday’s press tour of Gak Sejong.

Gak Sejong, located 93 miles out of Seoul and just 4.3 miles away from Sejong City Hall, is the second data center that Naver operates on its own, following the Gak Chuncheon data center in Gangwon province.

The name of the data center, Gak, is inspired by the janggyeonggak at the Haeinsa Temple in South Gyeongsang which houses the Triptaka Koreana, a set of more than 81,000 wooden printing blocks from the 13th century that still can be seen today. In general, "gak" was a designation given to buildings in Korea hundreds of years ago that were dedicated to preserving important books and documents.

Naver's Gak Sejong data center [NAVER]

As of 2025, Naver is expected to pay 22 billion won ($15 million) just in electricity bills, but Gak Sejong is also less than 20 percent completed. The North Hall currently only operates at one-third of its capacity, with its second phase of development planned for completion by 2027 and its third phase in 2029.

Even after Naver completely fills up the North Hall, it already has a site prepared just next to the current hall, for future expansion.

The Sejong data center was opened just two years ago and is currently just in its first out of six phases of construction. It was built with stringent safety criteria, strong enough to withstand the type of earthquake that hit Fukushima in 2011.

However, Naver was open about the fact that they can’t possibly be immune to all natural disasters, especially fires.

Instead of claiming that Gak was fireproof, the company emphasized that the key is always having a backup data center, so that services operate normally even if a major fire or other disruption hits a single data center.

“If one of our data centers, or one that we rent, goes down, we would have to recover it,” Naver Cloud’s chief information officer Lee Sang-joon said. “But until then, we would consider the data center gone and reroute operations to the other data center we operate.”

This backup system costs the company more, obviously, and adds complexity to the operation. An expensive measure, but a necessary one to have when operating the country’s most-used search engine service, according to Lee.

“We just can’t afford to have any downtime for the main search page of Naver.”

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]