Ooredoo's Syntys Breaks Ground on a 20MW AI-Ready Data Centre in Doha

The groundbreaking took place on November 12 and was attended by Qatar's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai, along with representatives of Ooredoo Group, Microsoft, Google, the utility Kahramaa, the National Cyber Security Agency, Qatar Free Zones Authority and local banks.

The project is the first new facility Syntys has started since it bought Q Data QFZ from Doha Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Qatar Free Zones Authority, earlier this year. Taken together, the acquisition and the new build show the company growing its home market both by buying operating capacity and by adding its own. The new 20MW is substantial next to the 26MW of live IT capacity Syntys said it had in Qatar after the Q Data purchase was announced in January.

The facility is being built on an existing Syntys campus where power, fibre and an operations team are already in place, the company said. It is designed to be Tier III-compliant and carrier-neutral, and to support a range of rack densities, including higher-density configurations for GPU-accelerated AI and high-performance computing. Syntys did not disclose the cost of the project, a completion date or details of its cooling design.

"Qatar is our home market, and we are seeing demand here translate into larger, denser and more varied deployments," said Sunita Bottse, Syntys's chief executive. "We are investing to meet that demand and designing this capacity for the densities our customers are moving toward."

Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, Ooredoo Group's chief executive, said: "Digital infrastructure is the nation-building foundation of the modern economy."

Four Campuses in Qatar

The Q Data deal secured 12.5MW of hyperscale capacity for Syntys, made up of 5MW in operation and 7.5MW under development in the Qatar Free Zones, and added two operating Tier III facilities that serve cloud and AI customers. Syntys now owns and operates four campuses in Qatar. That allows customers to run primary systems and disaster recovery in separate locations inside the country, which matters for organisations bound by data residency rules.

Syntys already designs and operates the facilities that host Ooredoo's sovereign AI cloud, which runs on Nvidia Hopper GPUs. The company says it is targeting more than 120MW of capacity across the Middle East and North Africa by 2030, according to Middle East AI News.

Ooredoo set up Syntys in 2025 by spinning out its regional data centre operations. The move followed a QAR 2 billion ($549 million) 10-year financing package that Ooredoo arranged in September 2024 with QNB, Doha Bank and Masraf Al Rayan to expand data centre operations across the region.

In its release, Syntys tied the project to Qatar's Digital Agenda 2030, which names digital infrastructure as one of six strategic pillars and targets about QAR 40 billion in economic impact by 2030. The main question now is how quickly the 20MW can be brought into service as customers move to larger and denser deployments.