Qatari telco Ooredoo is seeking additional data center capacity to meet the demand for artificial intelligence.
First reported by the Wall Street Journal, Ooredoo is looking to house the latest-generation Nvidia GPUs, gained following a partnership between the two companies signed in July this year.
The financial terms of the deal and the technology provided by Nvidia remain unknown.
At the time, Ooredoo’s CEO Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo said: “Our B2B clients, thanks to this agreement, will have access to services that probably their competitors [won’t] for another 18 to 24 months.”
The GPUs are anticipated to be housed across 26 of Ooredoo’s data centers in Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Tunisia, and the Maldives.
This will be Nvidia’s first AI deployment in the MENA region.
According to the WSJ, Ooredoo has struggled to create new data centers to meet the growing demand for AI infrastructure. The company previously pledged $1 billion to increase its capacity by more than 120MW.
Ooredoo’s Indonesian division, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, worked with GoTo Gojek Tokopedia last month to introduce Sahabat- AI, an AI language model for Indonesian languages. This project trains and improves AI using Nvidia’s AI Enterprise platform.
Majority-owned by the sovereign wealth fund, Ooredoo most recently launched a data center in Sohar, Oman. The company secured $552 million in financing to accelerate the growth of its data center business earlier this year.
In August 2023, the Biden Administration banned exports of Nvidia and AMD's latest GPUs to some countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates. At the time, it was believed the restrictions were brought about by China's deepening ties to some Middle Eastern nations.