A month-old Indonesian AI venture just borrowed $3.1 billion to buy Nvidia GPUs
Zankore, launched in August by Indosat, Ooredoo, Nokia and Nvidia, secured a senior loan from five banks to fund the first phase of a planned 1-gigawatt AI factory -- one of the largest such financings in Asia.
Zankore, a joint venture between Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Ooredoo Group, Nokia and Nvidia launched in August 2026, secured a $3.1 billion senior term loan facility on September 9, 2026 to finance the buildout of its Indonesian AI cloud platform. Citi, ING, Natixis CIB, Qatar National Bank and United Overseas Bank arranged the facility, with Citi acting as exclusive debt adviser. The loan funds an initial roughly 100MW deployment of Nvidia infrastructure, scaling toward 200MW by mid-2027 and a stated three-year target of 1 gigawatt of Nvidia DSX AI Factory capacity, positioned to serve hyperscalers, enterprises and AI developers across Southeast Asia.
A month-old borrower, a familiar circularity
Zankore was only established the previous month, and one of its own shareholders -- Nvidia -- is also the hardware vendor the loan proceeds will pay. That's the same structure showing up across several recent AI infrastructure financings: chipmakers investing in, and supplying, the entities that buy their chips, with lenders extending billions against contracted-but-largely-unbuilt capacity rather than an established operating track record.
Part of a wider Southeast Asian buildout
The deal lands in the same week Firmus, another Nvidia-backed builder, signed OpenAI as an anchor customer for AI factory sites in neighboring Malaysia. For a region long treated as a compute consumer, the pace and scale of financing now flowing into local AI factory operators is itself the story -- worth watching for how much of this contracted capacity actually reaches energization on the stated timelines.