AI 패권 전쟁의 서막: 엔비디아를 등에 업은 네이버와 갈등의 늪에 빠진 카카오 > K-wave Trends

Naver's stock price rise is interpreted as the result of a practical technological alliance beyond simple expectations. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang directly mentioned Naver Cloud in his keynote speech at 'GTC Taipei' held in Taiwan and engraved a 'heart' between the two companies' logos, a symbolic event that solidified Naver's position in the global AI market. In particular, Naver has established itself as a full-stack partner that is most closely aligned with NVIDIA's hardware ecosystem through its huge language model, AI infrastructure, and data center 'Gak', led by HyperclovaX. The successive meetings between founder Lee Hae-jin and Jensen Hwang instilled strong confidence in investors, suggesting that this cooperation is not just a thematic issue, but has entered the stage of a specific action plan encompassing Sovereign AI and Physical AI.

On the other hand, Kakao is facing the painful reality of internal labor-management conflict and management uncertainty. The strike, which was announced for the first time since the company's founding, goes beyond simply the issue of wage negotiations between labor and management, raising concerns that it could cause serious disruption to Kakao's core growth engines of AI model development and service advancement. As labor-management conflict prolongs at a golden time when management should be making all-out efforts to improve the company's structure and promote new businesses, the market is expressing doubts about the speed of Kakao's service expansion and the possibility of recovering competitiveness. In particular, in a situation where agent models such as the new AI service 'Canana in KakaoTalk' have not yet proven meaningful traffic or sales performance, such external negative news is acting as a factor that further dampens investment sentiment.

The stock market is evaluating Naver's aggressive moves positively from the perspective of 'visibility of AI-based monetization.' 'AI Tab' and 'AI Shopping Agent', a hyper-personalized commerce solution introduced by Naver, are proving their value as an advertising platform by improving search efficiency and increasing purchase conversion rates. This is the result of establishing a virtuous cycle structure that provides high targeting effectiveness to advertisers and a smooth experience from browsing to purchase to users by elaborately analyzing user usage patterns. Naver's stamina, which is maintaining a solid growth trend by recording the highest quarterly performance ever, is laying the foundation for its explosive power to double when it meets a strong global ally called NVIDIA.

The ripple effect of Jensen Hwang's visit to Korea is not limited to Naver, but has created a new term called 'Jensen Hwang effect' throughout the domestic stock market. The phenomenon of stock prices rising and falling for each company he visits or technology he mentions proves that Korean companies are becoming key partners in building global AI infrastructure. However, such rapid stock price fluctuations can also be a double-edged sword that increases market volatility. Naver also recorded an upper price limit of over 300,000 won due to rumors of Jensen Huang's visit to Korea, but showed high volatility, such as being adjusted again due to the overlap of profit taking volume and external uncertainty. This means that investors are reacting very sensitively to AI-related good news, but a cautious approach is still needed until the actual profit structure is established.

The differences in strategies chosen by Naver and Kakao to take the lead in the future AI market are expected to become clearer. Naver is seeking to 'expand the technology-centered ecosystem' through a solid alliance with NVIDIA encompassing hardware and software, and this is actually leading to sales in the B2B enterprise market. On the other hand, Kakao is taking a strategy to combine its existing vast user base and service ecosystem such as mobility and pay with AI, but if it does not resolve the risk of internal conflict early, there is a high risk of falling behind competitors in the early stages of improving the completeness of the AI ​​agent. Ultimately, the success or failure of future platform companies depends on how well AI technology can be connected to practical business models and profit generation, and how to secure the stability of internal management to support this.