Ooredoo Commits $800 Million to Lead $13 Billion Indonesian AI Infrastructure Platform

Ooredoo Group is committing $800 million over the next five years as the lead investor in Zankore, a newly established artificial intelligence compute and neocloud platform in Indonesia targeting 1 gigawatt of total capacity. Ooredoo, which holds a 49% founding stake in the venture alongside Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), has pre-sold 200 megawatts of capacity scheduled for deployment in the first half of 2027. The initial 200 MW phase is projected to generate $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over a five- to six-year period.

The Qatari government-majority-owned telecommunications group expects Zankore to deliver a proportionate EBITDA contribution of approximately $600 million to its own balance sheet. The initial phase will be financed through a combination of equity and debt, drawing physical compute capacity from multiple third-party data center providers across Indonesia.

The investment reflects a deliberate multi-year strategic shift away from legacy telecommunications operations toward high-margin digital infrastructure. “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 Group Chief Executive Officer 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.”

Under the alliance structure, Zankore will operate a GPU-as-a-Service cloud platform, allowing enterprise customers to rent high-performance graphics processing units on demand for AI model training and deployment. An orchestration layer using Nvidia technology will manage capacity sharing and recover stranded power across the GPU fleet, raising total available compute power by up to 40%. “Nvidia is bringing their compute and AI expertise, as well as general architecture, while Nokia is bringing their networking expertise,” Fakhroo said.

Indonesia is emerging as a critical region for high-density computing as neighboring technology hubs encounter severe land and power constraints. Data center power demand across Southeast Asia is projected to quadruple from 2.6 GW in 2025 to 10.7 GW by 2035, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, while KPMG forecasts Indonesia’s digital economy will exceed $130 billion by 2030. “More closely, we see future demand coming from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which are starting to experience constraints in their power capabilities,” Fakhroo noted.

Fakhroo highlighted Indonesia’s structural advantages for power-intensive workloads, pointing to a young, digital population, supportive regulation, and a diverse energy mix spanning natural gas to hydroelectricity. “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 said. “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.”

Strong regional demand has enabled Zankore to select blue-chip enterprise tenants for its initial capacity rollout. “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,” Fakhroo 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.”

The platform expands on existing momentum at Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Indonesia’s second-largest mobile operator formed via a $6 billion merger in 2022. IOH’s neocloud business recorded $33 million in revenue in the first half of 2026—surpassing the $28 million generated during all of 2025—and holds between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in contracted future revenue. By the third quarter of this year, IOH will own and operate roughly 28 MW of Nvidia-powered GPU capacity as it expands into model training token factories and its own large language model. Greater Jakarta remains the country’s central hub, hosting AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, ByteDance, and Alibaba Cloud alongside facilities from DCI Indonesia, Digital Edge, NeutraDC, and STT GDC.

Ooredoo has executed a parallel infrastructure strategy across the Middle East and North Africa, where it committed $1 billion to launch its Mena Digital Hub before raising QR2bn ($550 million) for network expansion. Following an investment from U.S.-based Iron Mountain, the entity was rebranded as Syntys in March last year. That business inked a deal in June 2024 to deploy thousands of Nvidia GPUs across 26 data centers in Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman. “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 expansion is backed by a conservative net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.6x, compared with its internal board target corridor of 1.5x to 2.5x. “That gives us significant dry powder in terms of investment capabilities,” Fakhroo said, noting that Ooredoo evaluates five to ten organic growth opportunities simultaneously. “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.”