23 SEP 2026 — Aolani, a Singapore company founded in 2023, says it will put 22,000 of NVIDIA's newest accelerators into Malaysia and the Philippines by early 2027. For the Philippines, that would be among the first large-scale AI platforms the country has hosted.
What the two companies have not said is where the machines go, how they split between the two countries, or what any of it costs.
What is being deployed
The hardware is NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra, spread across two new sites. Aolani puts its total after the expansion at more than 48,000 accelerators and more than 100 megawatts of capacity, against a deployment window it describes as early 2027.
Aolani was founded in 2023 and joined NVIDIA's cloud partner programme the same year. Its chief executive, Nicholas Chia, called the arrangement "a defining moment in Aolani's mission to deliver world-class AI compute".
Why the Philippines matters here
Malaysia is the continuity. It has spent three years becoming one of the region's main sites for this kind of building, and another cluster there changes little.
The deployment in the Philippines is the departure. TradingKey describes it as one of the country's earlier large-scale AI infrastructure platforms, which is a careful way of saying the country has little comparable infrastructure.
A first facility in a market matters more than the accelerator count, because it sets the power arrangements, the siting precedent and the customer expectations that later ones inherit.
What has not been disclosed
The list is long enough to be the story. The companies have not published the procurement amount, the system configurations, the customer list, the contracts, the split of accelerators between Malaysia and the Philippines, or the locations of either site.
Nor is there a figure for power beyond the headline capacity: no grid connection, no supply arrangement, no local cost. More than 100 megawatts is a substantial draw on any national system, and in the Philippines it would land somewhere that has not hosted this before.
Announcements are allowed to withhold commercial terms. The number they did release is the easiest to verify and the least consequential.
Who Aolani is
Aolani is three years old and Singapore-founded. In its own release it calls the deal "a first of its scale for a Southeast Asian-founded company". That is the company's characterisation, not an independently established fact, and it has shaped how the deal has been reported.
The regional comparison does not flatter Aolani. Major cloud providers have together committed more than 50 billion dollars to AI data centres in the region, with Google at about 2 billion dollars in Malaysia and Microsoft at 2.2 billion over four years. Aolani's figure is unpublished, so it cannot be placed on that scale at all.
The terms with NVIDIA
The structure of the deal is unusual. NVIDIA is not simply selling hardware. The arrangement is described as a revenue-sharing and credit-support model: the chipmaker takes a portion of the cloud revenue and helps with project financing to ease the capital burden early on.
That makes the supplier a counterparty to its customer's earnings, and a participant in the financing that buys its own product. It is a reasonable way to seed capacity in a market that cannot yet fund it alone. It also means the demand signal this announcement represents is partly manufactured by the company selling into it.
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