NHN Shares Jump 12.9% as KOSPI Sinks 6% on U.S. Data Center Fears

NHN shares rose 12.89% on Nov. 6, 2026, a day the KOSPI fell 6.02% and most Korean technology stocks were sold hard. The Korean game, payments and cloud company ended regular trading at ₩57,800 ($42.61), up from ₩51,200 ($37.74), and filed no new disclosure that day.

The move came from the market's reading of U.S. politics, not from company news. News1 tied the rally to hopes that Korean data center operators would benefit from tighter U.S. rules on new data centers, reporting that NHN was up 23.44% in an article published at 2:55 p.m. Samsung SDS and LG CNS, two other Korean IT service companies, also rose.

NHN trades on the KOSPI, the main board of the Korea Exchange, under the code 181710. At the close, its 32,328,965 shares were worth about ₩1.87 trillion ($1.38 billion). Won amounts here are converted at ₩1,356.6 per dollar, the won's 3:30 p.m. rate in Seoul on Nov. 6, 2026, as reported by the Korea Herald.

Some market pages, including Hankyung's, showed a later price of ₩59,200, up 15.63%, which includes trading after the regular session. The official closing price is the 3:30 p.m. price. For how the trading day works, see our guide to Korean stock market hours.

Why NHN Rose on a Crash Day

The KOSPI closed at 5,059.69 after a circuit breaker halted trading, and foreign investors were net sellers of ₩2.77 trillion ($2.04 billion), the Korea Herald reported. The paper said "fears of tighter regulation on AI data center investments after the US midterm elections have rattled markets." Our KOSPI market wrap for Nov. 6 covers the wider sell-off.

In the U.S., Senator Bernie Sanders called for a pause on data center construction and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell more than 12%, Financial News reported. Within the Korean market, IT services stocks gained 1.51% even as chipmakers fell.

"The anxiety that there will likely be regulation, but no one knows how much, deepened the plunge in tech stocks," said Lim Jeong-eun, an analyst at KB Securities, according to Financial News (translated from Korean).

NHN itself has said it has no U.S. data center project. In an Aug. 20, 2026 filing answering a press report, the company said it has nothing under way on data center investment in the U.S. and that no specific decision had been made on further data center investment. That makes NHN a domestic data center operator, which is exactly the profile the Nov. 6 trade rewarded.

What NHN Does

NHN is often called a game company, but payments now bring in more than half its revenue. In the first half of 2026, payments and advertising made up 53.93% of its ₩1.43 trillion ($1.05 billion) revenue, other businesses including cloud 27.20% and games 18.87%, its half-year report shows. Japan contributed 13.79%.

The payments side includes PAYCO, a mobile payment app, and NHN KCP, an online payment gateway. The cloud business sits in NHN Cloud, a subsidiary split off on April 1, 2022. In Japan, NHN PlayArt runs mobile games and NHN Techorus resells cloud services.

The name can confuse foreign readers. NHN was created on Aug. 1, 2013, when the game unit of the original NHN Corporation was spun off; that original company is now Naver, Korea's largest internet portal. NHN was relisted on the KOSPI on Aug. 29, 2013.

Chairman Lee Jun-ho, a former Naver executive, is the largest shareholder. He and related parties held 57.40% of the shares on Sept. 22, 2026, according to a filing.

A Record Second Quarter

NHN posted record quarterly revenue and operating profit in the second quarter of 2026. Operating profit rose 164.1% from a year earlier to ₩57.9 billion ($42.7 million), and revenue rose 25.3% to ₩757.9 billion ($558.7 million), according to its preliminary filing. Operating profit beat the ₩42.9 billion consensus, MoneyToday reported.

The figures come from NHN's preliminary consolidated filings; margins are our calculation. Net profit attributable to shareholders was ₩20.0 billion ($14.7 million) in the quarter, up 121.1% from a year earlier but 15.0% lower than in the first quarter.

The technology segment, which includes cloud, grew 52.9% to ₩159.8 billion ($117.8 million). NHN Cloud's revenue rose 85.3% as GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) sales, renting out graphics chips for AI work, ramped up at its Seoul Yangpyeong site using Nvidia B200 chips, Asia Business Daily reported. Payments revenue grew 27.3% to ₩394.0 billion ($290.4 million) and games 21.5% to ₩139.6 billion ($102.9 million).

"The effects of business efficiency improvements and cost controls that we have pursued over the past few years started to be reflected in our performance from the fourth quarter of last year," CEO Woojin Jung said, according to Asia Business Daily's English edition. He added that the company would take the second-quarter profit "as the starting point for our next phase of growth."

The Data Center Build-Out

NHN Cloud plans to secure 30 megawatts (MW) of new data center capacity by the end of 2027. On Aug. 28, 2026 it agreed to lease space equal to 20 MW in a data center to be built in Pohang for 60 months, and it is studying other options, including its own build, a filing shows.

"Our GPU business is targeting overseas markets rather than domestic, and we are seeing increasing demand from foreign companies," NHN Cloud CEO Donghoon Kim said on the August earnings call, according to Asia Business Daily. He said the company plans to secure a data center in Japan.

The growth has been funded with debt. NHN Cloud's total assets rose from ₩278.6 billion ($205.4 million) at the end of 2024 to ₩1.0 trillion ($738.3 million) at the end of 2025, while liabilities went from ₩145.6 billion ($107.3 million) to ₩886.1 billion ($653.2 million). It still lost ₩21.1 billion ($15.6 million) in 2025 on revenue of ₩215.8 billion ($159.1 million), NHN's Oct. 13, 2026 filing shows.

In that filing, NHN guaranteed ₩176 billion ($129.7 million) for a ₩160 billion ($117.9 million) loan from KB Kookmin Bank to NHN Cloud, running to October 2029. NHN's guarantees for all affiliates now total up to ₩689.7 billion ($508.4 million).

NHN is also selling assets. On Oct. 29, 2026, it agreed to sell its entire stake in iParking, a smart parking company, to HCW Holdings Ltd. for ₩99.3 billion ($73.2 million), citing business restructuring. The deal has a long-stop date of Jan. 28, 2027.

On a possible listing of NHN Cloud, Chief Financial Officer Hyunsik Ahn said in August that talks were continuing with financial investor IMM Investment. "We will only provide concrete answers when the GPU business is further scaled up and sufficient operating profit is secured, as a proper valuation must also be achieved," he said, according to Asia Business Daily.

Earnings Per Share

NHN earned ₩653 ($0.48) per share in the second quarter of 2026, up from ₩288 ($0.21) a year earlier, a gain of about 127% by our calculation. Earnings per share (EPS) here is basic EPS attributable to shareholders, as reported in the half-year report. For the first half, EPS was ₩1,418 ($1.05) against ₩168 a year earlier.

For full-year 2025, NHN reported EPS of ₩1,023 ($0.75), after a loss per share of ₩4,039 ($2.98) in 2024, according to its annual report. At the Nov. 6 close of ₩57,800, the stock traded at about 56.5 times 2025 EPS, by our calculation.

FnGuide data on Naver Finance show slightly different figures because they appear to use a different share count: ₩954 for 2025, a loss of ₩3,904 for 2024 and a loss of ₩243 for 2023. On FnGuide's ₩954, the price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) is about 60.6.

The FnGuide consensus of ₩3,211 for 2026 puts the stock at about 18.0 times forward earnings. Hitting that number would require roughly ₩1,880 of EPS in the second half, against ₩1,330 in the first half on FnGuide's basis, by our calculation.

NHN has not yet reported third-quarter results; they are due on Nov. 10, 2026. The FnGuide consensus for the quarter assumes net profit attributable to shareholders of ₩30.7 billion ($22.6 million), about 2.5 times the ₩12.1 billion ($8.9 million) of a year earlier, when basic EPS was ₩387.

What Analysts Say

Three brokerages raised their targets in early September 2026, after the record quarter. All rate the stock a buy.

The targets were reported by Financial News, MoneyToday and Hankyung. Their average, about ₩86,300 ($63.64), is 49% above the Nov. 6 close, by our calculation.

Samsung Securities analyst Oh Dong-hwan valued NHN's stake in NHN Cloud at ₩1.4 trillion ($1.03 billion). NHN also runs 20 MW of government-owned GPUs at Yangpyeong, and Oh said the company would "lease 20% of these to private customers and generate about ₩100 billion in annual GPUaaS revenue," according to MoneyToday (translated from Korean).

Hanwha's Kim So-hye estimated that NHN runs 38 MW across Pangyo, Gwangju and Yangpyeong, with 22 MW producing revenue. Both firms expect the new capacity to add to earnings mainly from 2028.

Korea Investment & Securities analyst Jung Ho-yoon pointed to supply. "The remaining uncertainty is how the company secures graphics processing units (GPUs)," he said, according to Hankyung (translated from Korean).

A Volatile Stock

The shares swing hard. On Aug. 11, 2026, the day of the second-quarter results, NHN rose 29.82% to ₩54,200 ($39.95), the maximum daily move allowed, Financial News reported. On Sept. 8, it fell 15.40% to ₩59,900 ($44.15) with no clear negative news, as foreign investors sold ₩7.8 billion of shares.

Through Oct. 12, 2026, NHN had returned 84.51% since the start of the year, MoneyToday reported. At ₩57,800, it is about 26% below its 52-week high of ₩78,200 ($57.64), according to Hankyung market data.

Korea context: Korean stocks can move at most 30% up or down in a day, which is why NHN's Aug. 11 gain stopped at 29.82%. NHN's 2026 value-up plan, part of Korea's push to raise company valuations, sets aside 15% of the prior year's consolidated EBITDA for dividends and buybacks, keeps the dividend per share at least at the prior year's level and cancels at least half of newly bought treasury shares within the year. It paid ₩500 ($0.37) a share for 2025. See our explainers on price limits and the value-up program.

What to Watch

The first test comes on Nov. 10, 2026, when NHN releases preliminary third-quarter results and holds a 9 a.m. conference call. The FnGuide consensus for operating profit was ₩54.0 billion ($39.8 million), MoneyToday reported on Oct. 12, up 95.3% from a year earlier but below the ₩57.9 billion of the second quarter.

Investors will also look for news on new long-term GPU contracts at Yangpyeong and on the Pohang lease. The third factor is outside NHN's control: how far U.S. data center rules actually go.

Taken together, NHN rose on Nov. 6 on a market view that Korean data center capacity gains value if U.S. building slows, while its record second quarter shows the GPU business is already adding to profit. The Nov. 10, 2026 results are the next dated check on whether earnings keep up with the share price.