Month-old Zankore lands $3.1bn loan to deploy Nvidia GPUs across Indonesia and Southeast Asia

Zankore Secures Massive Financing Just Weeks After Launch

Nvidia-backed Zankore has closed a senior term loan facility of up to $3.1bn to acquire and deploy Nvidia GPUs across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, marking one of the largest AI infrastructure financing deals in the region1

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. The transaction involves five international banks—Citi, ING, Natixis CIB, Qatar National Bank, and UOB—underwriting the facility for a company that launched in August, giving it only about four weeks of operating history at the time of the deal1

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. Citi served as exclusive debt adviser while all five banks acted as senior mandated lead arrangers, underwriters and bookrunners1

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Nvidia's Dual Role Creates Unique Financing Structure

The financing arrangement presents an unusual structure where Nvidia functions both as a shareholder in Zankore and as the supplier of the hardware the loan will purchase1

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. This model reflects Nvidia's broader strategy over the past year to mobilize third-party capital for AI infrastructure projects, effectively distributing the risk of the AI infrastructure buildout across a growing group of lenders1

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. The deal includes revenue-sharing and credit-support arrangements designed to link deployment pace to customer demand, though questions remain about what exactly secures the loan1

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. Bloomberg reported that an Nvidia partner found strong demand for a rare GPU-backed financing facility in Asia, suggesting the hardware itself could form part of the collateral1

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Telecoms Infrastructure Underpins Ambitious Expansion Plans

Zankore operates as a dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform developed with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nokia, and Nvidia2

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. The Ooredoo Group holds a 49% stake as founding shareholder and lead investor, positioning itself early in the Southeast Asia AI sector's rapid expansion2

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. The telecoms connection explains how such substantial financing materialized so quickly—Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison ranks among Indonesia's largest mobile operators, bringing the land, power connections, regulatory position and balance sheet necessary to support large infrastructure projects1

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. While Zankore itself is new, much of the underlying infrastructure is not1

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Deployment Timeline Targets Gigawatt-Scale Capacity

The company plans to start with 100MW of Nvidia infrastructure in Indonesia, scaling to approximately 200MW of capacity in the first half of 20271

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. The ultimate goal involves building 1GW of what Nvidia calls DSX AI Factory capacity over three years1

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. Zankore will sell GPU capacity for AI training, fine-tuning, inference and agentic workloads to enterprises and developers across the region1

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. Proceeds from the debt financing will support the acquisition and deployment of advanced Nvidia GPU infrastructure as the Nvidia AI cloud platform expands its footprint2

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Indonesia Emerges as Critical Testing Ground

Indonesia is becoming a crucial test case for this AI infrastructure financing approach. Zankore represents the second major Nvidia-backed project in the country, following Firmus, which is building a 360MW site in Batam based on expectations of $30bn in offtake deals1

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. Both companies are planning large Nvidia-powered facilities with Nvidia as an investor in each, while across Southeast Asia, developers are planning roughly four times the data center expansion capacity currently in operation1

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. Watch whether customer contracts materialize at the scale needed to validate the model—if demand falls short, lenders face exposure to a large pool of GPUs whose value could decline as the market shifts1

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. A loan secured against GPUs, whose resale value depends partly on the same demand expected to repay the loan, carries different risk from one secured against long-term customer contracts1

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