Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison pushes for Sovereign AI to power Indonesia's growth

15/05/2025 01:58 AST

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is spearheading the development of sovereign AI to elevate Indonesia's economic trajectory, according to president director and CEO, Vikram Sinha.

"Indosat has a larger purpose - to connect and empower every Indonesian. In Indonesia, I believe that the rise of AI presents the country with an unprecedented opportunity to uplift our GDP growth to around 8% per year.

"By creating sovereign AI for Indonesia, we can cement our position as a regional technology hub, further drive economic growth and ultimately help the country achieve the Golden Indonesia 2045 vision," Sinha told Gulf Times in an exclusive interview.

He explained that sovereign AI means "AI in Indonesia, developed by Indonesia, for use by Indonesians and Indonesian businesses."

Sinha explained that the company is helping the Southeast Asian nation in building capabilities to produce AI using domestic infrastructure, data, and talent. This also democratises AI, providing all Indonesians and businesses in the country access to what he described as a "revolutionary technology."

He said: "Right now, Indonesia is at a pivotal moment in its journey towards Golden Vision 2024. It is already the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and with a vibrant digital economy and young and dynamic population of over 270mn, AI has the potential to take growth to the next level."

Supported by global partners, such as Nvidia and Accenture, Sinha believes Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is well-positioned to build the infrastructure necessary to foster a thriving AI ecosystem.

"As one of the leading telecoms companies in Indonesia and with the strong support of our shareholders, including Ooredoo Group, we believe we are well placed to help create Indonesia's Sovereign AI capabilities and foster a thriving AI ecosystem in the country," he emphasised.

At the same time, Sinha said Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is laying the groundwork for Indonesia's first full-stack sovereign AI factory, which he said is a major investment designed to give the country a competitive edge in the Southeast Asian region. "We began building the foundations of our AI factory in February 2024 when we partnered with NVIDIA to become their first cloud provider partner in Indonesia, working with our subsidiary Lintasarta. Under the partnership, we have established a sovereign AI cloud platform for Indonesia, leveraging the portfolio of high-density data centres owned by Lintasarta.

"These high-quality data centres host advanced, full-stack accelerated computing platforms that use NVIDIA's latest GPUs and can support the most computationally intensive tasks needed to support AI applications," he said.

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison has since launched 'GPU Merdeka' (meaning "independent"), its sovereign AI-cloud service providing businesses with access to powerful GPUs on demand, said Sinha.

"GPU Merdeka aims to democratise access to AI for all businesses in Indonesia by providing GPU-as-a-Service and a range of additional AI tools, including NVIDIA's AI Enterprise, to support them in developing their own AI applications," Sinha explained. Sinha noted that Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is developing a foundational AI model and a range of industry-specific AI-powered applications, citing the company's Sahabat-AI foundational large language model (LLM), developed in partnership with Nvidia and GoTo Group.

He said Sahabat-AI is an open-source LLM trained on local Indonesian datasets and specifically designed for Bahasa Indonesia and Indonesian dialects, allowing Indonesian businesses to build AI-based services that understand the local language and are tailored for Indonesian users.

"With Sahabat-AI, we aim to ensure that AI is inclusive and beneficial for all Indonesians. We have made it open source so research institutes, universities, enterprises, media and government agencies can all be part of a national effort to train this AI foundation model and foster a broad AI ecosystem in Indonesia," he said, adding that "We see applications for AI across a wider range of sectors in Indonesia, including government services, healthcare, banking, education and agriculture to name just some."

Sinha further said Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is also investing in AI talent development: "People and talent sit right at the heart of our ambitions to become an AI-native company and our plans to create sovereign AI capabilities in Indonesia. We are fully committed to helping to build Indonesia's human capital so that its workforce has the skills needed to develop and use AI."

Gulf Times