In October, Naver secured an order worth $100 million to build digital twins, virtual replicas, of Saudi Arabian cities including Riyadh, Mecca, and Medina. The digital twin technology will be used for infrastructure-building and disaster management of the cities.
A digital twin is literally a virtual clone of an organism, object, or infrastructure. The digital clones are used to conduct various tests to see what kind of effects certain situations would bring without actually affecting the real-life target. The digital twin technique is often used to see the effects of natural disasters such as an earthquake, hailstorms, or a tsunami would do to urban infrastructure.
Naver Cloud, Naver's cloud computing wing, said the company forged a partnership with iot squared, jointly set up by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Saudi Telecom Company (STC) Group. The Saudi Arabian joint venture was established to develop and commercialize technologies in the fields of digital transformation and smart city solutions.
"We will continue to expand our partnerships like the one we forged with iot squared," Naver's Chief Communications Officer Chae Seon-ju said in a statement on December 7. "We will put in the multi-angle effort to upgrade the level of Saudi Arabia's smart city solutions through Naver's technology capability," Chae said.