Ooredoo's $800M bet puts Indosat, Nokia, and Nvidia on a 1-gigawatt AI data center track

Ooredoo Group has committed roughly $800 million to a new regional AI infrastructure platform, Zankore by Indosat, that pairs Indonesian telecom carrier Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison with Nokia and Nvidia. The long-term target is a 1-gigawatt buildout of Nvidia's "AI factory" reference design across Southeast Asia, with the first 200 megawatts scheduled for the first half of 2027, according to Ooredoo's release.

The structural detail underneath the press release is the point. Zankore is not a single owned data center campus, and the partners are not buying ground and pouring concrete on a hyperscaler-style site. Instead, the platform will aggregate capacity from multiple third-party data center providers across Indonesia under a neocloud model, then sell GPU-as-a-Service to enterprise customers across the region. Reuters, carried by Zawya, and a Fortune interview with Ooredoo Group CEO Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo added the partner-capacity detail and the multi-year financial framing.

An "AI factory," in Nvidia's framing, is a cluster of data centers purpose-built for large-scale AI training and inference, not a generic cloud region retrofitted with GPUs. A 1-gigawatt target puts Zankore in the same scale conversation as a hyperscale campus, while the path there is orchestration rather than ownership. Nvidia's DSX MaxLPS layer, the software that will sit on top of the partner data centers, claims up to 40% more usable compute from the same power envelope by recovering stranded capacity across the GPU fleet, the technical reason a multi-gigawatt ambition can be underwritten without a single anchor real-estate deal.

The near-term numbers are more modest and more concrete. The 200-megawatt tranche for the first half of 2027 is tied to blue-chip customers that Ooredoo says are already signed, though the names are not public. Ooredoo's five-year platform forecast, which the company itself describes as forward guidance rather than third-party verified, points to roughly $13 billion in revenue and about $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA, with Ooredoo's 49% share contributing around $600 million of that EBITDA over the same window. The 1-gigawatt figure remains a long-term target rather than a near-term build.

KPMG Indonesia, cited in coverage of the announcement, expects Indonesia's digital economy to exceed $130 billion by 2030, with demand for AI-ready data centers inside the country rising alongside it. That backdrop is the case for siting a regional platform in Indonesia rather than routing Southeast Asian demand through Singapore or a U.S. cloud region. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the local carrier inside the joint venture, is Indonesia's second-largest mobile operator, formed from a 2022 merger valued at $6 billion, and Ooredoo, its Qatari parent, serves close to 150 million customers across nine MENA and Southeast Asian markets.

Ooredoo has not disclosed how the $800 million splits between equity, capex, and the partner contributions from Nokia and Nvidia. The product scope is also thin: it is not yet clear whether Zankore sells model-serving and agent tooling on top of wholesale GPU access, or which Nokia networking products anchor the stack. The 40% MaxLPS efficiency claim comes from Nvidia and has not been independently benchmarked at this scale. And the blue-chip customers behind the 200-megawatt commitment for the first half of 2027, the only named near-term revenue line, remain undisclosed.

The next test is the H1 2027 delivery itself: 200 megawatts stitched together across multiple Indonesian data centers, with named customers paying for it. The $800 million and the 1-gigawatt target are commitments on a slide. The structural bet is whether orchestration plus Nvidia's reference design can carry a multi-gigawatt ambition without owning the underlying real estate.