Naver squats over modern Korean life like a greedy landlord who charges extra for the black mould and still evicts you if you complain.

Cummins In The Machine Room, Accountability In The Bin

Naver’s hyperscale wet dreams live and die on uptime. A hyperscale data centre isn’t a “building”. It’s a parasitic organ grafted onto the internet. If it flatlines, the empire starts bleeding cash.

So Naver built Gak Sejong, a monster facility built to gorge on cloud and AI demand. And when the grid shits itself, Naver doesn’t pray. It fires up the diesels.

Phase 1 alone runs 18 Cummins generator sets built on the QSK95 platform. That’s the entire fucking point of this series. Cummins isn’t “adjacent” to the AI economy. Cummins is the dirty jack holding up the whole stolen car.

Cummins loves to dress it up as heroic. “Critical infrastructure”. “Digital future”. Pretty words for ugly business.

Truth is simpler: Cummins sells the right to never face consequences. Uninterrupted service, uninterrupted revenue, uninterrupted power, uninterrupted moral rot. Beautiful deal – if you’re the kind of company that measures success by how long you can keep screwing everyone without the lights going out.

Naver’s Power Problem: When You Control The Tap, You Control The Thirst

Naver isn’t just “a tech company”. It’s the choke point. In a country where one platform decides what millions read, buy, and believe, Naver’s dominance isn’t a side effect. It’s the whole fucking business model.

And when you own that much leverage, you do what every monopoly does eventually: you rig the game, tilt the table, then gaslight everyone that the dice were fair all along.

That’s not opinion. That’s what unchecked power always does when it gets bored.

Shopping Search Games: The Fine That Smelled Like Pure Self-Dealing

2020: South Korea’s competition regulator slaps Naver with a fine for rigging its algorithms to funnel users to its own shopping services, plus a corrective order (later overturned on appeal).

Cue the corporate mouthpieces whining about “complexity”. Algorithms are so mysterious, nobody could possibly understand them. Whoopsie.

Bullshit. The point of owning the algorithm is control. If you can code yourself to the top forever, you can choke competitors slowly, politely, permanently. It’s like owning every road and rewriting every satnav to detour traffic through your toll booth. You don’t need to ban rivals. You just bury them alive with a smile.

Regulators argue over the screwdriver shape while the machine keeps grinding. Because Cummins is in the basement, making damn sure it never stops.

Real-Time Trends: When The Crowd Becomes Your Personal Remote Control

Naver’s real-time search terms were a national addiction. Then they became a national liability. When “trending” can be gamed, nudged, and weaponised, it stops reflecting society and starts steering it.

Naver finally killed the feature amid endless manipulation scandals.

Killing your own golden goose only happens when the goose starts shitting napalm. That’s not a harmless tool. That’s an influence machine with a hair trigger.

Influence machines crave uptime. Cummins delivers. The manipulation never has to blink.

Webtoons, Culture Wars, And The Platform That Profits Off The Pus

Naver’s webtoon empire is massive. Global pipeline of attention, ad revenue, and cultural soft power. Also a permanent petri dish for backlash.

Naver Webtoon has spent years dodging flak for hosting and approving misogynistic trash, failing moderation, and only acting when the public finally drags them kicking and screaming – complete with boycotts, mass refunds, and young users fleeing the platform.

The platform dance is always the same:

Profit off the rot.
Deny it exists.
Apologise when the mob arrives.
Tighten guidelines and pretend the rot started yesterday.

Dark metaphor: Naver doesn’t clean the wound. It waits for the blood to crust over, then calls it “community feedback” and cashes the cheque.

AI Training And News Content: Feed The Model, Starve The Source

Now throw AI into the blender.

2025: Korean Association of Newspapers files formal complaint (joined by broadcaster lawsuits) after Naver admits using news content without proper permission to train HyperCLOVA and HyperCLOVA X.

The new corporate gospel: “Sovereign AI”. “National competitiveness”. “Innovation”.

Translation: steal everyone’s work, launder it through a model, then sell the sludge back as revolutionary.

Publishers aren’t idiots. If your shiny new toy runs on news, you either license it or you parasitise it. There is no magical third option called “oops, the future”.

None of this matters if the servers die. Cummins keeps them breathing. Diesel in the basement. Lawyers upstairs. Bullshit press releases in the lobby.

Why Naver Belongs In Greedy Genset Giants

Because this series isn’t about “customers”. It’s about Cummins.

Cummins is riding the AI/data-centre wave like a tick on a rabid dog. Gets to look cutting-edge while peddling the same old combustion, the same old continuity, the same old licence for powerful institutions to keep breaking shit without ever hitting pause.

Naver isn’t unique. Naver is just a pristine specimen. Enormous influence, serial controversy, and the same predictable ending: nothing actually changes except the wording of the next apology.

Cummins doesn’t give a fuck about ethics. Cummins cares about invoices.

That’s why this series exists. To rip the glossy cover off the boom and show the scandals, the leverage, the excuses, the customers – all of it humming along on diesel fumes.

Closing Cut

Naver sells itself as essential modern life. Cummins sells Naver the right to never, ever stop – no matter how much damage it does.

The public gets to live inside the machine, paying for the privilege while platforms rig markets, steer narratives, host poison, and hoover up content to feed their next cash cow.

It isn’t “technology”. It’s power, propped up by diesel.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Greedy Genset Giants : Naver – Korea’s Digital Overlord, Cummins Backup, And A Rot That Never Sleeps