Ooredoo’s Zankore: Why Southeast Asia’s AI Compute Crunch Is About to Get a $Billion Fix—And Who Gets Left Behind

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By: Oliver Hawthorne

Southeast Asia’s AI compute demand is outpacing global averages. But key markets like Singapore and Thailand face tight power constraints. They can’t build enough data centers to keep up. Indonesia has the opposite problem. It has cheap power, ample land, and a young, digital-savvy population. Yet hyperscalers have only scratched the surface of its potential. This gap has created a window for a new player to seize regional control—and Ooredoo is betting billions it can be that player.

Ooredoo Group, majority-owned by Qatar’s government but independently managed, is leading a multi-billion-dollar push into Indonesia. It’s launching Zankore, the country’s first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform, with backing from Nvidia, Nokia, and its affiliate Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH). Ooredoo holds a 49% stake in Zankore and is committing $800 million over five years to kickstart development. The platform aims to hit 1 gigawatt of AI capacity in three years, powered by Nvidia’s latest tech. Already, it has secured blue-chip customers for 200 megawatts of capacity planned for the first half of 2027. That initial 200MW is expected to generate $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over five years, with Ooredoo’s share hitting around $600 million. Zankore will offer GPU-as-a-Service, letting users rent high-performance GPUs for AI training without buying hardware. An orchestration layer using Nvidia tech will recover stranded power across the GPU fleet, unlocking up to 40% more compute power. Nokia is providing networking expertise to keep the platform running smoothly.

IOH, Indonesia’s second-largest mobile telecom, is a critical piece of the puzzle. Formed via a $6 billion merger in 2022, it already has a head start with Nvidia. Two years ago, it became Nvidia’s first cloud partner in Indonesia, testing the model that Zankore now scales. By the third quarter of this year, IOH’s Nvidia-powered AI cloud will operate 28MW of GPU capacity. Its neocloud business pulled in $33 million in revenue in the first half of 2026, surpassing the $28 million it made all of 2025. It also has between $1.2 and $1.5 billion in contracted revenue for the coming years. Now, IOH is building a token factory for AI model training and its own large language model. The market supports this push. KPMG forecasts Indonesia’s digital economy will exceed $130 billion by 2030. Wood Mackenzie projects Southeast Asia’s data center power demand will quadruple from 2.6GW in 2025 to 10.7GW by 2035. Demand in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand is already outstripping their power capabilities. Zankore plans to expand to these markets as it scales. For existing players like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, the writing is on the wall. They’ve focused on Jakarta, but Zankore’s efficiency and regional expansion will force them to either partner up or pour more money into Indonesia’s untapped regions. In five years, when supply and demand balance out, the winner will be the provider that operates most efficiently—and Zankore’s orchestration tech gives it a head start that’s hard to match.

Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne is a principal correspondent covering global cloud and AI infrastructure, with 12 years of on-the-ground reporting across Asia.