NAVER Seeks an 'AI Alliance' with Mexico, Discusses Cooperation with Government and Businesses

[Financial News] NAVER is stepping up efforts to enter the Latin American market by seeking cooperation with the Mexican government on AI infrastructure and public-sector AI transformation (AX). The company plans to participate in building a local AI ecosystem by expanding cooperation from national AI clusters to digital twins.
NAVER said on the 29th that it had visited Mexico as part of an economic delegation during President Lee Jae Myung's trip to the United States and Mexico. The company discussed AI-focused business cooperation with officials from the Mexican government and major local information technology (IT) companies.
NAVER CEO Soo Yeon Choi, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Kim Hee-cheol, Chief Data Officer (CDO) Kwang-hyun Kim and other executives met with Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubón, Mexico's Secretary of Economy; Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, Secretary of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation; officials from the Agency for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications; and the CEO of Softtek over two days beginning on the 24th (local time).
Choi introduced NAVER's public-sector AX capabilities, sovereign AI strategy and AI Factory project, which is being developed with NVIDIA and Brookfield, to Mexican government officials. Based on these capabilities, she proposed cooperation on Mexico's public-sector AX and AI transformation across industries. Ebrard explained that the Mexican government has recently been expanding exchanges with global AI companies such as NVIDIA while working to foster its domestic AI industry. He said he hoped NAVER could contribute to building Mexico's AI ecosystem and advancing its digital transformation.
The two sides also discussed potential cooperation on building national AI infrastructure. Choi met with Ruiz, the Secretary of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation, to discuss cooperation related to Mexico's plans to build a national high-performance computing (HPC) and AI cluster. NAVER is also identifying cooperative projects with Querétaro State, where more than 70% of Mexico's data center infrastructure is concentrated. The two sides are discussing detailed implementation plans for a pilot project to build digital twins for two major cities in Querétaro State.
Kwang-hyun Kim led a session at the Korea-Mexico Business Forum held on the 25th and emphasized to business leaders from both countries the importance of building AI ecosystems that reflect each country's languages, data and industrial characteristics. He also presented a plan to connect Korean AI technologies and expertise, including those of NAVER, with Mexico's AI transformation as the manufacturing powerhouse of North and Central America moves toward adopting AI.
This was the first time NAVER executives had visited Mexico to meet with key government and business officials to explore the market. In August, Choi also met with executives from Brazilian AI infrastructure companies Scala Data Centers and Tecto Data Centers, as well as Entel, Chile's largest telecommunications operator, to discuss potential cooperation.


[email protected] Hye-rim Choi Reporter