Ooredoo partners with Nvidia and Nokia to launch 1GW AI compute platform in Indonesia.

Ooredoo Group is positioning itself to capture a multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure opportunity by developing Indonesia's first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform, enabling enterprises to develop, train, deploy, and operate AI models at scale.

Through an alliance with Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), the platform, known as Zankore, aims to contract 1 gigawatt of AI capacity over the next three years, powered by Nvidia's supercomputing platform. Zankore has already secured blue-chip customers for approximately 200 MW of capacity planned for the first half of 2027, expected to generate around $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over five to six years. Ooredoo Group's proportionate EBITDA contribution is expected to reach approximately $600 million.

As founding shareholder and lead investor with a 49% stake in Zankore, Ooredoo Group is committing $800 million over five years to support the platform's development. Though majority-owned by the Qatari government, the group is independently managed and listed.

"We've been positioning ourselves for a good 36 months, or even more now, to steadily migrate from a traditional telco to a leading digital infrastructure provider," said Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, Group CEO of Ooredoo. "Zankore is the latest building block in that evolution. We started this journey two years ago through IOH, our affiliate in Indonesia, when we struck a deal with Nvidia to become its first cloud partner in Indonesia. That allowed us to test at a lower scale the proposition we're bringing at a much larger scale today."

Zankore's neocloud platform will provide GPU-as-a-Service—a cloud computing model enabling users to rent high-performance graphics processing units over the internet. Widely used to train AI models, it allows users to pay only for the compute time they consume rather than purchasing costly physical hardware. An orchestration layer will decide how GPU capacity is shared across multiple users or clusters and leverage Nvidia technology to recover stranded power across the GPU fleet, enabling up to 40% additional compute power and increasing Zankore's capacity to serve customers and generate revenue.

"Nvidia is bringing their compute and AI expertise, as well as general architecture, while Nokia is bringing their networking expertise," Fakhroo said.

IOH, Indonesia's second-largest mobile telecommunications company, was formed via a $6 billion merger between Indosat Ooredoo and Hutchison Asia Telecom Group in 2022. Ooredoo had acquired a 65% stake in Indosat for $1.8 billion in 2008.

This investment aims to strengthen Ooredoo's exposure to Indonesia's rapidly growing data center market and position it to capitalize on Southeast Asia's booming AI compute and cloud industry. KPMG forecasts that Indonesia's digital economy will exceed $130 billion by 2030, with demand for AI-ready data centers expected to intensify in coming years.

"There is a significant opportunity in Indonesia that made it a great base from which to operate in Asia," Fakhroo said. "It's a vast country with a sizeable population who are young and digitally savvy. It's also resource-rich and extremely well-positioned geographically, with very forward-looking regulation. It is fortunate to have ample supply of land, as well as good cost and availability of power from different sources, such as local natural gas to hydro, which is obviously important when it comes to data centers."

A recent McKinsey study cited by Fakhroo noted that AI adoption across Southeast Asia is showing stronger momentum than the global average. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia's data center capacity demand is expected to grow rapidly, driven by AI workloads, digital transformation, and cloud adoption. According to Wood Mackenzie, total regional power demand is projected to quadruple from 2.6 GW in 2025 to 10.7 GW by 2035.

"We see future demand coming more closely from Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, which are starting to experience constraints in their power capabilities," Fakhroo added.

Demand for Zankore's initially planned 200 MW of compute capacity already exceeds that figure. "That puts us in a situation where we're cherry-picking our tenants in terms of reputational compliance and balance sheets. We're talking about multi-hundred-million-dollar contracts from prime customers, so we're confident that this is a very high-value proposition," Fakhroo said. "Indonesia's market is in great momentum where demand is significantly outstripping supply. But maybe five years down the line, when that supply-demand equilibrium is slightly more balanced, the lowest common denominator will be who can deliver these facilities and operate them most efficiently."

Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, has established itself as the country's primary cloud and hyperscale data center hub, home to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. Major operators including DCI Indonesia, Digital Edge, NeutraDC, and STT GDC, along with hyperscalers ByteDance, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud, have aggressively expanded their pipelines in recent years. According to global data center research company DC Byte, the market's future development will likely follow a two-tier model comprising connectivity-rich facilities in or near the central business district and larger hyperscale campuses across Greater Jakarta's industrial estates.

By the third quarter of this year, IOH's Nvidia-powered AI cloud services will own and operate approximately 28 MW of GPU capacity. In the first half of 2026, IOH's existing neocloud business generated $33 million in revenue, surpassing the $28 million recorded for all of 2025. The company has between $1.2 and $1.5 billion in contracted revenue for the coming years. IOH is now focused on extending its AI capabilities by supplementing its GPU compute power with a token factory for training AI models and developing its own large language model.

Ooredoo has also stepped up its ambitions to build out data center infrastructure across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few years amid increasing competition from Gulf neighbors. In June 2024, it struck a deal with Nvidia to deploy thousands of GPUs across 26 data centers throughout the region, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman. This followed Ooredoo's decision to invest $1 billion in Mena Digital Hub, its newly established data center company, and the subsequent $550 million raised to expand its regional network.

In March 2025, Mena Digital Hub was spun out and rebranded as Syntys following an undisclosed investment from U.S.-based data center company Iron Mountain. "When Syntys was established, we had just 16 megawatts of capacity," Fakhroo said. "We've already doubled our installed base since then, and new builds are ongoing—just a few months ago, we signed for a 4.5 MW expansion. So, we're going full speed ahead despite everything that's happening geopolitically. We set a target back in 2024 to expand our installed data center capacity in the Middle East to more than 120 MW by 2030—we'll be way ahead of that by then."

Ooredoo's strategy reflects a broader trend among telecom companies globally seeking to transform into digital infrastructure providers to capitalize on the AI boom and ease margin pressures. Ooredoo's net debt-to-EBITDA ratio currently stands at 0.6x, significantly below the company's board guidance range of 1.5 to 2.5x, providing substantial investment capacity.

"That gives us significant dry powder in terms of investment capabilities," Fakhroo said, declining to discuss potential future target markets. "At any given point in time, we're looking at anywhere between five and 10 opportunities simultaneously, and we've always preferred organic growth opportunities over inorganic because we see much higher returns for investors from them. That said, we're extremely disciplined in how we approach them. The first question is: 'Do we have a right to play?' And then, do we have a specific competitive angle? And then what are the synergies? In the case of Zankore, it more than ticked all those boxes."