Ooredoo, Nvidia, Nokia launch Zankore neocloud in Indonesia

A Gulf telco writing an $800 million check to become an AI infrastructure landlord in Indonesia is the sort of move that says AI compute outside the US and China is starting to look like real business, not a slide in an investor deck. Fortune reported that Qatar's Ooredoo Group is teaming with Nvidia, Nokia and its regional operator Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison to launch Zankore, a neocloud platform aimed at Southeast Asia, with Ooredoo taking a 49% founding stake.

The scale of the target is what makes it interesting. Zankore is aiming for 1 gigawatt of AI capacity within three years, with roughly 200 megawatts already contracted for the first half of 2027. Shareholders project about $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over five years, with Ooredoo's proportionate share of that EBITDA around $600 million. CEO Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo framed the deal as the payoff of a longer pivot, saying the group has "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."

Why this matters beyond one deal: the working assumption for a while has been that hyperscale AI infrastructure would concentrate in a handful of US and Chinese providers, with everyone else renting. A regional telco raising this much capital to own the GPU layer directly, and locking in Nvidia and Nokia as partners, is a bet that customers in Indonesia and the wider region will pay for compute that stays close, both physically and commercially. Southeast Asia's data center power demand is projected to quadruple from 2.6 gigawatts in 2025 to 10.7 gigawatts by 2035, so the addressable market is plausibly there if they can actually build.

The honest caveat is that the biggest numbers here are shareholder forecasts, not booked revenue. Only about a fifth of the 1 GW target is contracted, and the reporting doesn't spell out who those anchor customers are, where the data centers will physically sit, or how power and grid interconnects in Indonesia get locked in on that timeline. Take the $13 billion revenue figure as a plan the partners are willing to commit capital against, not a settled outcome.

The read for anyone building AI products regionally is simpler. If Zankore ships anywhere close to its plan, GPU access in Southeast Asia stops being a purely US-hyperscaler question, and a meaningful chunk of that spend stays in the region.