Gulf capital flows target Asian AI infrastructure amid global uncertainties

Investors from the Gulf are committing funds to AI projects in Asia, with Qatar's Ooredoo backing an Indonesian compute platform and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala eyeing a large data centre in Japan.

Amid ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Europe and lingering supply-chain doubts, investors from the Gulf region are turning to Asia for AI growth opportunities. Qatar-based telecom Ooredoo is the principal backer of Zankore, a new AI compute platform in Indonesia, committing $800 million to support its rollout and targeting 200 MW of capacity by next year, with hardware supplied by Nvidia and Nokia. Ooredoo, which has operated in Indonesia for almost twenty years, expects data-centre demand in Southeast Asia to more than triple by 2030.

In parallel, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala is weighing a lead investment in a proposed $6.3 billion, 500-MW data centre in Japan’s Akita prefecture. While Gulf nations are heavily promoting AI development at home, these sizable overseas deals illustrate a broader strategy to capture a stake in the critical infrastructure that powers the technology.