Zankore — Indonesia builds Southeast Asia's largest AI factory
The race to build Southeast Asia's compute backbone just got a new front-runner. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Ooredoo Group, Nokia, and NVIDIA have teamed up on Zankore by Indosat, an AI infrastructure venture that targets up to 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity — which the partners bill as one of Southeast Asia's largest AI factory platforms.
Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison has joined Ooredoo Group, Nokia, and NVIDIA to launch Zankore by Indosat, an AI infrastructure venture targeting up to 1 GW of capacity — a bid to make Indonesia one of Southeast Asia's biggest AI computing hubs. The platform is built on NVIDIA's DSX AI factory architecture, which packages compute, networking, power, and cooling into a single system, and it will deploy NVIDIA's MaxLPS power-management technology to recover "stranded" electricity and squeeze up to 40 percent more compute out of the same power budget. The first phase — roughly 200 megawatts (MW) in the first half of 2027, running on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems — has already secured blue-chip customers, and the venture is designed to expand beyond Indonesia to serve the wider Asia-Pacific market.
The money behind it is the more interesting part. Ooredoo Group, the Qatar-government-controlled telecom that operates in nine markets across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, is the lead investor with a 49 percent stake and an $800 million commitment over the next five years; across all partners the total pledge is multi-billion-dollar. Zankore's CEO is Ulf Ewaldsson, a former Ericsson chief technology officer, and Fortune reports the venture is projected to generate around $13 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cumulative EBITDA over five years. Indosat arrives fresh off a $650 million fibre carve-out last month — part of the same strategic migration from phone carrier to digital infrastructure provider that Ooredoo's CEO describes as a deliberate, years-long repositioning.
Why it matters: AI compute is being industrialized into "factories," and the buildout is spreading well beyond the US–China axis — with sovereign-linked capital from the Gulf funding infrastructure for a region that has mostly watched from the sidelines. For Indonesia, Zankore is a bid to convert cheap power and rising enterprise demand into a regional AI hub. For NVIDIA, DSX is a playbook for selling entire factories rather than just GPUs. And the MaxLPS power-efficiency claim is worth tracking: power, not silicon, increasingly looks like the binding constraint on AI buildouts.
What to watch: whether Zankore's 200 MW first phase lands on schedule in the first half of 2027, and how it prices capacity against hyperscaler clouds already planted in Singapore and Malaysia.
Do you think sovereign-linked capital like Ooredoo's will reshape where the world's AI compute gets built? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Nokia · Fortune · DealStreetAsia · Industry-Asia-Pacific · Intimedia · Sea-Daily
