Zankore Secures Up to $3.1B AI Debt Financing

Zankore was developed with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nokia and Nvidia, and Ooredoo holds a 49% stake as founding shareholder and lead investor. The company said it is initially building 100 megawatts of Nvidia AI infrastructure, with a longer-term target of 1 gigawatt of Nvidia DSX AI Factory capacity and about 200 megawatts in the first half of 2027. Citi acted as exclusive debt adviser on the loan, underscoring the institutional appetite for AI infrastructure financing when the counterparty stack includes telecoms, chipmakers and strategic regional investors.

For Nvidia, the deal reinforces a broader revenue story: the chipmaker’s customers are no longer just U.S. hyperscalers, but a wider group of cloud providers, sovereign projects and AI-native firms racing to secure compute. Nvidia shares, which have recently traded around the 50-day moving average with momentum still positive but less stretched than in earlier surges, remain tightly linked to whether those capital spending plans turn into sustained orders and installations.

The bull case is that Southeast Asia is underpenetrated, underbuilt and well-positioned to absorb AI workloads as enterprises, governments and startups localize data and compute. The bear case is that the economics of AI clouds can be unforgiving: high debt loads, power bottlenecks, utilization risk and rapid hardware obsolescence can pressure returns if demand fails to ramp as quickly as planned.

What investors will watch next is execution — whether Zankore can convert financing into live capacity, secure power at scale and fill that infrastructure with customers. If it can, the deal could become a template for how regional telecom-linked platforms finance the next wave of AI infrastructure outside the U.S. and China.