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Jofie Yordan · · 5 min readIndosat bets big on AI. Is Indonesia ready?
Indonesia is becoming an attractive market for AI, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison wants to make the most of this.
Over the past year, the country’s second-largest telco firm has launched a flurry of initiatives — from its AI Factory and Sahabat AI large language model (LLM) to its recently unveiled AI Center of Excellence.
The results are starting to show, particularly through the firm’s AI Factory, which is operated by its subsidiary Lintasarta in collaboration with Nvidia.
The unit provides graphics processing units and data center solutions to more than 43 clients across sectors like banking, mining, government, and oil and gas.
“We already signed a contract worth around US$30 million, which will flow into our P&L this year,” Indosat CEO Vikram Sinha tells Tech in Asia. “Next year it will be US$70 million, and these are multiyear contracts.”
Nvidia’s Blackwell GB200, a next-generation AI chip built for high-performance computing, will power the company’s data center for this AI Factory.
Indosat has pulled ahead of other Indonesian telco firms in the AI race. Still, it needs to prove that its other strategies will work. Sahabat AI, for one, competes with global tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, which are available in Indonesia.
The country’s big-picture sovereign AI goals, while ambitious, are also still a “long way off,” according to industry observers. But Indosat – with its sheer scale and big-name partnerships – is betting that it could pave the way.
Sahabat AI vs. ChatGPT?
In June, Indosat and GoTo launched the latest version of Sahabat AI, an open-source LLM with 70 billion parameters. Its focus is on Bahasa Indonesia and several regional languages that are spoken across the country.
Currently, Sahabat AI is only accessible via the web and within GoTo’s GoPay app. CEO Sinha says a standalone app will launch soon, though he did not disclose specifics.
The short-term target, he says, is to “democratize” AI adaptation by making the language more relevant. Sinha is confident that Sahabat AI will “be by far better” in understanding local dialects than ChatGPT.
His reasoning: For ChatGPT, Bahasa Indonesia is just one of many languages it supports. For Sahabat AI, it’s the core focus.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that ChatGPT, Gemini, and its global peers can already process prompts and generate responses in Indonesian – as well as Javanese or Sundanese – accurately.
Capacity exists, but demand is low
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Indonesia has GPU power, but not enough users. Find out how Indosat wants to change that – with Nvidia chips, local models, and a vision of true digital sovereignty.
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