Naver Team announced on March 5 that it signed a partnership with Aramco Digital, a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, to foster digital innovation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, including Saudi Arabia.
Through this agreement, both parties aim to establish a sovereign cloud and super app optimized for the Middle Eastern region, including Saudi Arabia, and collaborate on the development of sovereign AI based on an Arabic Large Language Model (LLM). Under the broad direction of SovereignAI, Naver Team plans to build AI models optimized for local culture and language using its own LLM technology and provide various solutions based on these models.
Naver Team is one of the few global companies that develop and operate their own LLMs from the pre-training stage. It emphasized its uniqueness in being able to propose optimized technology and infrastructure for the cost-effective operation of high-cost LLMs, and solutions beyond, with Naver being the only company capable of this outside of the big tech companies in the U.S. and China.
Furthermore, the two companies plan to join forces in constructing smart buildings and smart cities, utilizing Naver Team’s technology in cloud computing, robotics, and digital twins. The smart city blueprint based on Naver Team’s technology, unveiled by Seok Sang-ok, CEO of Naver Labs, during the LEAP 2024 keynote, will be actualized through collaboration with Aramco Digital.
The signing ceremony was attended by key executives from both companies, including Tareq Amin, CEO of Aramco Digital, and Chae Seon-ju, Naver's Representative for External and ESG Policy. The collaboration began following Chae Seon-ju’s visit to Aramco’s headquarters in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in January, where Aramco Digital proposed the partnership, leading to fruition within two months.
Chae Seon-ju, Naver’s representative for external and ESG policy, expressed her hope that “based on the successful digital innovation case with Aramco Digital, Naver’s technology will actively expand into other regions.”