Ooredoo teams up with Nvidia and Nokia to launch 1 GW AI platform in Indonesia

Through an alliance with Nvidia, Nokia and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), the platform, known as Zankore, aims to contract 1 gigawatt (GW) of AI capacity over the next three years, powered by Nvidia’s supercomputing platform and latest technology.

Zankore has already secured blue-chip customers for around 200 MW of AI capacity planned for the first half of 2027. This is expected to generate around $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative Ebitda over a five- to six-year period. The proportionate Ebitda contribution to the Ooredoo Group is expected to be around $600 million.  

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

The initial 200 MW of capacity is expected to be funded through a combination of equity and debt, while the initial AI capacity will be sourced from multiple data center providers with facilities across Indonesia.  

“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,” Ooredoo’s Group CEO Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo told Fortune.  

“And 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 comprise GPU-as-a-Service—a cloud computing model that lets an end user rent high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) over the internet. Widely used to train AI models, it enables users to pay only for the period they use the compute for, rather than buying 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. This will enable up to 40% more compute power, thereby 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 telecoms company, was formed via a $6 billion merger between Indosat Ooredoo and Hutchison Asia Telecom Group in 2022. Ooredoo acquired a 65% stake in Indosat for $1.8 billion in 2008.  

This latest investment aims to strengthen Ooredoo’s exposure to Indonesia’s rapidly growing data center market, as well as 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 and expects demand for AI-ready data centers to intensify in the coming years.  

Fakhroo said there is a “significant opportunity” in Indonesia that made it a “great base” from which to operate in Asia.  

“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,” he added. 

“It is also fortunate to have an 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.” 

Fakhroo cited a recent McKinsey study noting 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, with total regional power demand projected to quadruple from 2.6 GW in 2025 to 10.7 GW by 2035, according to Wood Mackenzie.  

“More closely, we see future demand coming from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which are starting to experience constraints in their power capabilities,” Fakhroo added.  

Fakhroo said that demand for Zankore’s initially planned 200 MW of compute capacity exceeds that figure.  

“That puts us in a situation where we’re cherry-picking our tenants in terms of reputational compliance, but also in terms of 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,” he said.  

“Indonesia’s market is in a 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.” 

To date, Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, has established itself as the country’s primary cloud and hyperscale data centre hub, home to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft. 

Jakarta has also seen major operators, including DCI Indonesia, Digital Edge, NeutraDC, STT GDC, as well as hyperscalers ByteDance, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud, all adding aggressively to its pipeline in recent years. 

According to global data center research company, DC Byte, the market’s future development is likely to 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. 

Fakhroo said that, by the third quarter of this year, IOH’s Nvidia-powered AI cloud services will own and operate around 28 MW of GPU capacity.  

In the first half of 2026, IOH’s existing neocloud business raked in $33 million in revenue, surpassing the $28 million it recorded for all of 2025. It has between $1.2 and $1.5 billion in contracted revenue for the coming years.  

IOH is now focused on extending its AI capabilities, supplementing its GPU compute power with a token factory for training AI models and its own LLM.  

Ooredoo has also stepped up its ambitions to build out its data center infrastructure across MENA over the past few years amid increasingly stiff competition from its Gulf neighbors.  

In June 2024, it struck a deal with Nvidia for thousands of its GPUs to be deployed in 26 data centers across the region, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman.  

The announcement followed Ooredoo’s decision to invest $1 billion in Mena Digital Hub, its newly established data center company. It subsequently raised QR2bn ($550 million) to expand its regional data center network.  

In March last year, Mena Digital Hub was spun out and rebranded as Syntys following an undisclosed investment from U.S.-headquartered data center company Iron Mountain.  

“When Syntys was established, we had just 16 megawatts of capacity,” said Fakhroo. “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, which are seeking to transform themselves into digital infrastructure providers as they look to capitalize on the AI boom and ease pressure on their margins.  

By contrast, Ooredoo’s net debt-to-EBITDA ratio currently stands at 0.6x, significantly below the company’s board guidance ratio, which stands at 1.5 to 2.5.  

“That gives us significant dry powder in terms of investment capabilities,” said Fakhroo, who wouldn’t be drawn on 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 looked for organic growth opportunities over inorganic because we see much higher returns for investors from them,” he added. 

“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.”