Zankore's $3.1bn loan prices sponsors as infrastructure

The $3.1 billion senior term loan Zankore has raised for its first Indonesian AI cloud phase is backed by a shareholder register, and how lenders price that paper will set the template for every sponsor-levered GPU loan that follows. Data Center Dynamics first reported the financing, which landed within weeks of the borrower coming into existence: Zankore is the joint venture Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison launched in August 2026 with the wider Ooredoo Group, Nokia and Nvidia, aimed at an initial 100MW of Nvidia AI infrastructure and, eventually, a gigawatt.

Citi, ING, Natixis CIB, Qatar National Bank and United Overseas Bank acted as senior mandated lead arrangers, underwriters and bookrunners; the loan itself comes from a consortium the announcement identifies only as regional and international financial institutions, and is intended to support roughly 200MW of Nvidia GB300 NVL72 capacity targeted for the first half of 2027. The disclosure names no customer for any of it.

Run the headline against the first phase and a per-megawatt figure falls out: $3.1 billion across 100MW implies roughly $31 million a megawatt, assuming the proceeds are not split between the first phase and the road to a gigawatt, a split the announcement does not make. The tenor, pricing and drawdown schedule are all undisclosed, so that number will travel further than it deserves. What it does establish is the shape of the structure: a gigawatt at the implied rate runs to a multiple of this facility, which makes the loan an opening tranche of a program rather than finished funding.

The sequence captures the urgency. Zankore was unveiled in August and a facility of this size was secured within weeks, with the first phase sized at half of what the company says it wants running inside a year; either the second 100MW comes out of this facility or a follow-on is implied by the calendar, and the announcement settles neither question.

Set Zankore against the GPU-cloud financings of the past month and the collateral is what separates them. Nebius turned Nvidia's equity stake into $5.75 billion of debt, with a spread that priced the near-term GPU buildout as infrastructure and the long haul as a risk asset; Lambda's $1 billion short-term placement leaned on a single tenant's lease payments; Starcloud raised $250 million on a valuation tied to a chip that has not shipped. Zankore's structure rests on a shareholder list — Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the wider Ooredoo Group, Nokia and Nvidia — and on nothing a lender can point to and call a contract. The August take on Nvidia's proposed Ohio exposure put the guarantee ahead of the equity as what would make that project financeable; here the support is cited in the chairman's framing, and the disclosure stops there.

As this publication has argued, hyperscaler anchors set the infrastructure price, and capacity without contracted cash flow is a merchant shell until proven otherwise; the question Zankore puts to that rule is whether Nvidia, Nokia and the two Ooredoo entities clear the bar. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison's own network and enterprise book is the likeliest buyer for the first 100MW, which would make the asset captive and shift lender diligence away from merchant price forecasts toward an affiliate contract written inside the same corporate family. But the announcement does not say who the first phase serves, and internal demand is a different instrument from a signed offtake agreement.

Power is the thinner page still: the coverage names no site, no grid position and no generation plan for a build whose stated end state is a gigawatt, and in constrained markets the variable this desk underwrites first is grid access, because the queue sets the schedule long before the checkbook does. A capacity target announced without a power contract is a financing event, with the electrons sitting in a separate diligence file. Indonesia's own grid build-out does not appear in the disclosure either, and whether the country can serve a load of that size is the question the next filing will have to answer.

Vikram Sinha, who chairs Zankore, framed the financing as a question of regional agency — Indonesia and Southeast Asia, in his account, need to build the computing base they will run on, and Nvidia's support makes that construction possible — while Kaustubh Kulkarni, Citi's head of investment banking for Asia Pacific, called the deal a 'landmark financing' and pointed to the bank's work on both Zankore's formation and this loan.

What a lender can diligence strips down to four items: a four-name sponsor group, Nvidia's continued allocation of GB300 systems, an Indonesian demand curve, and a first-half 2027 delivery date. Only the date is public. If the 200MW arrives on schedule with a customer of scale attached, the follow-on capital becomes a more ordinary credit conversation for the same five leads, and the gigawatt stops being a slide and becomes a schedule. If the date slides or the tenant stays unnamed, the market will have repriced what a sponsor list is worth as collateral, and every GPU-cloud borrower leaning on a recognizable shareholder gets repriced with it.