The Sacred Data Center: Korean Patriotic Buddhist Materiality, Naver, and the Making of AI Sovereignty

As scholars have begun examining how AI is reshaping religion, one question often goes unnoticed: How have religious practices and institutions legitimated AI infrastructure? This paper examines how Naver, South Korea's dominant platform company, appropriated a 750-year-old Buddhist heritage to legitimate its AI infrastructure, revealing religion and AI as co-constituted in ways invisible in Western-centric discourse. This paper analyzes how Naver named its data center "Gak" after Janggyeong-gak at Haeinsa Temple, the 15th-century depositories housing the Tripitaka Koreana, constructing an imaginary that recast economic protectionism as cultural patriotism and AI sovereignty. The paper traces how this imaginary became self-contradictory through global expansion and raises questions about the Jogye Order's strategic silence. It concludes that religious communities risk losing interpretive power over their own traditions when those traditions are instrumentalized as legitimating infrastructure for corporate AI ambitions.