Cassidy: AI compute has gone gigawatt in the Gulf and Asia.
Cassidy: Now comes the slightly awkward part: powering all of it.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Gulf money, Southeast Asian capacity, and plenty of 2028 promises—let's see how many have customers behind them.
Cassidy: Let's start with Ooredoo, Nvidia, and Nokia, because Indonesia is where this stops being a glossy Gulf announcement.
Bill: Follow the show and the next briefing lands in your feed on its own.
Cassidy: From Yahoo Finance:
Quote: The initial targeted 200 MW AI capacity will be sourced from multiple data center providers with facilities across Indonesia.
Quote: As the platform grows, it is designed to expand beyond Indonesia and serve customers across Southeast Asia.
Cassidy: Ooredoo is putting $800 million behind Zankore’s first 200 megawatts in Indonesia.
Cassidy: It’s using existing data-center providers rather than waiting for a greenfield campus
Cassidy: so that capacity can reach Southeast Asian customers before the big 2028 promises.
Bill: The 40% more compute claim is the one number I’d scrutinize.
Bill: Shared GPU scheduling can recover idle capacity
Bill: absolutely—but when that orchestration layer guesses wrong on a latency-sensitive workload
Bill: somebody’s expensive inference job gets parked.
Cassidy: And Nvidia isn’t just supplying chips; its technology runs the layer deciding who gets GPU time across the fleet.
Cassidy: Indonesia may host the racks, but the control plane decides who captures the value.
Bill: Ooredoo forecasts $13 billion in five-year revenue from this platform.
Bill: Fine—now earn it with utilization, uptime, and prices customers will renew at.
Bill: A GPU-as-a-service business lives or dies in those unglamorous decimals.
Cassidy: This one's from AGBI:
Quote: Neom’s planned artificial intelligence data centre campus is expected to break ground within months, its developer DataVolt said.
Quote: The start of construction would mark a milestone for one of Saudi Arabia’s most closely watched giga-projects
Quote: as Neom’s focus shifts f rom futuristic plans to practical infrastructure such as ports
Quote: logistics and data centres.
Bill: A 1.5-gigawatt campus breaking ground in October or November and operating in 2028—there’s that date again.
Bill: Every infrastructure deck in the world has apparently booked the same vintage year.
Cassidy: DataVolt has put $5 billion behind the first phase at Oxagon, while Neom supplies the land and infrastructure.
Cassidy: That’s more concrete than the usual render-and-superlative routine.
Bill: Concrete, yes—but DataVolt still hasn’t disclosed the first-phase capacity or who’s contracted for it.
Bill: And at a 1.5GW AI factory, things get unforgiving when latency-sensitive customers all want the same GPUs at once.
Cassidy: Neom’s promise is renewable-powered, net-zero compute at the Red Sea port.
Cassidy: Fine. I’ll hold off on “world’s lowest-cost compute” until somebody shows the delivered inference price, not a slogan.
Cassidy: Here's Mark Tarre at IT Brief Australia:
Quote: Asia Pacific's data centre development pipeline reached a record 26.5GW in the first half of 2026
Quote: with the region adding 7.1GW in six months
Quote: according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Quote: The total includes 4.8GW under construction and 21.7GW of planned capacity.
Bill: Twenty-six-point-five gigawatts sounds enormous.
Bill: Split it out: 4.8GW is under construction, and 21.7GW is planned.
Bill: That’s about four and a half gigawatts of plans for every gigawatt actively being built.
Cassidy: And Cushman & Wakefield says Southeast Asia holds about half the active construction.
Cassidy: Malaysia alone has 1,039 megawatts going up; Johor nearly doubled its in-progress capacity to 602MW in six months.
Cassidy: The map’s shifting toward places that can actually supply power.
Bill: Vacancy falling to 10.3% says existing capacity is getting used, so this isn’t just slide-deck theater.
Bill: But those 21.7 planned gigawatts still have to survive permits, substations, cooling, and a customer willing to pay the bill.
Cassidy: We just heard Gulf operators targeting Southeast Asia and Neom preparing a 1.5GW campus.
Cassidy: That 26.5GW figure puts those announcements in context: infrastructure capital is following electricity, not old connectivity maps.
Cassidy: From Seo Ji-hye at Seoul Economic Daily:
Quote: SK Telecom (017670.KS) raised its second-quarter operating profit by 67.3% from a year earlier
Quote: driven by rapid growth in its artificial intelligence (AI) data center business and improved profitability in its telecommunications
Quote: operations. AI data center (AIDC) revenue reached 136.2 billion won, up 92.5% from a year earlier to nearly double.
Bill: SK Telecom has the number all those giant capacity slides need: 136.2 billion won in AIDC revenue, up 92.5%.
Bill: Somebody is already paying for compute in Korea.
Cassidy: And that matters after the Gulf and Southeast Asia buildouts we just covered.
Cassidy: SK Hyper’s 5-gigawatt target by 2029 is still an ambition, but the earnings report gives it a real revenue base.
Bill: The catch: 136.2 billion won is 3.1% of SK Telecom’s consolidated revenue.
Bill: It’s growing fast, but it still doesn’t explain a 5-gigawatt construction appetite.
Bill: And the 67.3% operating-profit jump got help from last year’s one-time costs.
Cassidy: Still, this is a useful signal.
Cassidy: Existing operating capacity produced nearly doubled revenue, and SK Hyper is the named unit set to execute the 5GW plan.
Cassidy: That gives us a better read on racks working now versus capacity promised for 2029.
Cassidy: If you want to track what happens after today’s AI headlines, try AI IPO Watch.
Cassidy: It covers IPOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and SpaceX—filings, valuations, and first trades, with sourcing, not rumors.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: Over the next two to three months, we’re watching for DataVolt to break ground on the Neom Oxagon AI data center campus.
Cassidy: Within six months, we’re also watching for non-recourse project finance for its Saudi facilities under construction, including Neom.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes, so dig into the ones you want to explore further.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.