Qatar's Ooredoo Group is spearheading a multi-billion-dollar investment to construct Indonesia's first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform, seeking to meet surging regional demand for AI infrastructure with support from Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH).

The platform, named Zankore, targets 1 gigawatt (GW) of contracted AI capacity within three years, powered by Nvidia's latest technology. Blue-chip customers have already committed to approximately 200 MW of AI capacity scheduled for delivery in the first half of 2027.

Ooredoo Group, as founding shareholder and lead investor holding a 49% stake in Zankore, is committing $800 million over five years to support the platform's launch and development. The group is majority-owned by the Qatari government but listed and independently managed. Collectively, shareholders are making a multi-billion-dollar commitment to the platform.

Zankore's initial 200 MW of capacity will be funded through a combination of equity and debt. This capacity is projected to generate approximately $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over a five-year period. Ooredoo Group's proportionate EBITDA contribution is expected to reach roughly $600 million. The initial AI capacity will be sourced from multiple data center providers with facilities across Indonesia, with plans to expand across Southeast Asia as part of a long-term regional growth strategy.

"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 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 offer GPU-as-a-Service, a cloud computing model allowing end users to rent high-performance graphics processing units over the internet. Widely used for training AI models, the model lets customers pay only for compute time used rather than purchasing expensive physical hardware. Neoclouds—a category that has drawn players such as CoreWeave in the U.S. and Crusoe—focus exclusively on GPU-intensive AI workloads, positioning them as specialized alternatives to general-purpose hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

An orchestration layer will manage GPU capacity allocation across multiple users or clusters and leverage Nvidia technology to recover stranded power across the GPU fleet, enabling up to 40% more compute power and increasing Zankore's ability 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 through 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 investment aims to strengthen Ooredoo's position in Indonesia's rapidly growing data center market and 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. Indonesia's data center appeal has been further bolstered by its data localization rules under Government Regulation 71/2019, which requires certain categories of electronic data and systems to be stored and processed domestically—creating structural demand for in-country compute capacity.

Fakhroo described a "significant opportunity" in Indonesia that makes it a "great base" for operations 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 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."

Fakhroo cited a McKinsey study noting that AI adoption across Southeast Asia shows stronger momentum than the global average. Meanwhile, Wood Mackenzie projects that Southeast Asia's data center capacity demand will grow rapidly, driven by AI workloads, digital transformation, and cloud adoption, with total regional power demand expected to quadruple from 2.6 GW in 2025 to 10.7 GW by 2035.

"More closely, we see future demand coming from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which are starting to experience constraints in their power capabilities," Fakhroo added. Singapore, which imposed a moratorium on new data center construction from 2019 to 2022 before partially lifting it under strict sustainability quotas, has seen constrained growth push spillover demand toward neighboring markets including Batam, Johor in Malaysia, and Jakarta.

Demand for Zankore's initially planned 200 MW of compute capacity already exceeds that figure, according to Fakhroo.

"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."

Jakarta has established itself as Indonesia's primary cloud and hyperscale data centre hub, hosting 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 all aggressively expanded their pipelines in the city in recent years.

According to DC Byte, the market's future development will likely follow a two-tier model: 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 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. It has between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in contracted revenue for the coming years.

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

Ooredoo has also accelerated its data center infrastructure buildout across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past few years amid intensifying competition from Gulf neighbors. In June 2024, the company secured a deal with Nvidia to deploy thousands of GPUs across 26 data centers in 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. The group subsequently raised QR2 billion ($550 million) to expand its regional data center network.

In March of 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," he added.

Ooredoo's strategy reflects a broader trend among global telecommunications companies seeking to transform themselves into digital infrastructure providers to capitalize on the AI boom and alleviate margin pressures. The pivot comes as legacy telecom revenue growth stalls across many emerging markets, pushing operators to monetize underutilized real estate, power assets, and enterprise relationships through higher-margin digital infrastructure.

Ooredoo's net debt-to-EBITDA ratio currently stands at 0.6x, well below the company's board guidance range of 1.5 to 2.5.

"That gives us significant dry powder in terms of investment capabilities," said Fakhroo, who declined 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 looked for 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."