Lenders are treating AI compute like a toll road with a telecom anchor tenant. A month-old Indonesian startup called Zankore has lined up a senior term facility worth up to $3.1B to buy and deploy Nvidia GPUs across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, with the chipmaker itself on the cap table as both backer and hardware supplier.
The syndicate reads like a who’s who of project finance. Citi, which also served as exclusive debt adviser, underwrote alongside ING, Natixis CIB, Qatar National Bank and UOB as senior mandated lead arrangers, and the facility’s revenue-sharing and credit-support clauses tie how fast money is drawn to real customer demand.
Zankore’s operating history is roughly four weeks, so the credit story rests on its parentage. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the Ooredoo Group, Nokia and Nvidia back the company, bringing the land, power connections, regulatory position and balance sheet depth that a large infrastructure project needs. Zankore sells GPU capacity for AI training, fine-tuning, inference and agentic workloads across the region.
The buildout starts with 100MW of Nvidia infrastructure in Indonesia, climbs toward 200MW in the first half of 2027 and eventually targets 1GW of Nvidia’s DSX AI factory capacity. Five global banks betting billions on a business with no track record is the clearest sign yet that AI compute has become bankable infrastructure.
