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Ooredoo is committing $800 million as a 49% founding shareholder in Zankore, a dedicated AI compute platform built alongside Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nokia, and Nvidia, targeting Southeast Asia’s underdeveloped AI infrastructure market. The Zankore build-out starts in Indonesia, aims for 200 megawatts of capacity by the first half of 2027, and targets a full gigawatt eventually. Ooredoo projects roughly $600 million in cumulative EBITDA over five years, framing this as an infrastructure bet with a credible return, not a speculative moonshot.
What this means for your business
If your organization is planning AI workloads across Southeast Asia in the next three years, your compute sourcing options just changed. The gap between GPU-rich markets like the U.S. and AI-starved regions like Indonesia has been a quiet constraint on enterprise expansion. Zankore, running Nvidia’s DSX MaxLPS technology (a hardware and software stack that squeezes roughly 40% more computing output from the same power draw), is directly attacking that gap. Companies already scoping regional data center strategy now have a named alternative to the hyperscalers worth tracking on timeline.
The more interesting signal here isn’t Ooredoo specifically; it’s the pattern. Gulf sovereign capital, whether Ooredoo in Southeast Asia or Mubadala reportedly weighing $6.3 billion in Japan, is systematically buying into AI infrastructure before enterprise demand in those regions fully materializes. That’s a supply-side bet, and it compresses the window for enterprises that assumed they’d wait for mature regional capacity before committing to architecture decisions. Waiting for the market to settle is itself a choice now, and it carries more risk than it did 18 months ago.
The falsification condition for Zankore’s $600 million EBITDA projection is straightforward: if hyperscalers accelerate their own Indonesian buildout faster than Zankore reaches 200 megawatts, the pricing power that makes that projection plausible evaporates. For CTOs renewing data center or cloud contracts with Southeast Asia exposure in 2025 or 2026, Zankore’s 2027 capacity date is the number worth stress-testing against your own roadmap, not as a vendor to sign with today, but as a variable that changes your negotiating position with the vendors you’re already talking to.
Based on reporting from Ooredoo leads $800M funding round for AI startup Zankore, originally published 2026-08-06 23:30:00.
