A Middle Eastern telecom giant just planted its flag in one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure markets on the planet. Ooredoo Group has unveiled Zankore, billed as Indonesia’s first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform, with plans to scale to 1 gigawatt of AI capacity within three years.

The alliance behind the platform

Zankore isn’t a solo act. The platform is being built through an alliance between Ooredoo Group, its Indonesian subsidiary Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), Nvidia, and Nokia.

Nvidia brings its supercomputing platform and latest accelerated computing technology to the table. Nokia’s role centers on modernizing 5G radio access networks to support the kind of low-latency, high-throughput connectivity that large-scale AI model training demands.

The corporate plumbing is already in motion. Zankore Hypercloud Singapore Pte. Ltd. was incorporated in April 2026, suggesting the operation has a dual Southeast Asian anchor in both Indonesia and Singapore.

IOH has also carved out a notable first for itself. It became Southeast Asia’s first telecom operator to commercially deploy AI-RAN technology in 2025, and only the third globally to do so. AI-RAN uses machine learning to optimize how radio networks allocate resources, making cellular networks smarter and more efficient without necessarily building more towers.

Why Southeast Asia, why now

Indonesia, with a population north of 270 million and a rapidly digitalizing economy, is arguably the most attractive market in the region for this kind of play. The country has been actively courting data center and AI infrastructure investment, and Ooredoo is positioning Zankore as the answer to enterprise demand for locally hosted AI capabilities.

Since 2024, Ooredoo Group has been deploying Nvidia-powered AI platforms across the MENA region, investing in sovereign AI clouds and GPU-as-a-Service offerings. Zankore represents an extension of that strategy into a new geography.

What this means for the compute economy

Ooredoo’s 1 GW target is ambitious by any standard. For comparison, major hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google have been scrambling to secure power capacity in the hundreds of megawatts for their own AI data centers.

The Nokia angle is worth watching for a different reason. The integration of AI-RAN with cloud compute infrastructure creates a vertically integrated stack where the network itself becomes AI-optimized.

Investors tracking the intersection of AI and digital assets should pay attention to how quickly Zankore scales its actual deployed capacity versus its 1 GW target. The broader signal is clear regardless: the fight for AI compute supremacy is going global, and Southeast Asia is becoming a major battleground. Traditional telecom operators are no longer content to just provide connectivity — they want to own the compute layer too.