Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) established an AI Center of Excellence (COE) on Friday in collaboration with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Cisco, and Nvidia, with the goal of accelerating the country’s AI competitiveness.
The COE comprises six institutional pillars, including an AI sandbox for developing real-world applications; an accelerator to support local AI startups; an enterprise hub for co-creating industry use cases; a national think-tank to guide responsible, ethical AI; and training to develop and certify local skillsets in and data science.
The COE also includes a platform to develop national large language models (LLMs) such as the Bahasa-based LLM SahabatAI, tailored for national use in education, SMEs, and public services.
As part of the centre’s strategy to boost Indonesia’s AI ambitions, Indosat and Nvidia will expand Indonesia’s first sovereign AI infrastructure with a platform for secure, high-performance AI workloads.
Indosat’s ICT arm Lintasarta – which launched its sovereign GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) running on Nvidia GPUs and software in August 2024 – will integrate the Nvidia GB200 NVL72, designed to accelerate next-generation generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC).
Cisco will deliver secure, intelligent infrastructure to protect Indonesia’s digital assets and intellectual property, anchored by a sovereign security operations centre (SOC) cloud platform, powered by Indonesia’s first use of Splunk and Cisco’s managed security services solutions. The SOC will combine AI-powered threat detection, localized data controls, and seamless integration with national infrastructure.
The AI COE aims to provide hundreds of millions of Indonesians with access to AI by 2027 by leveraging Indosat’s mobile network infrastructure.
The COE is also committed to equipping 1 million Indonesians with digital skills in networking, security, and AI by 2027.
To that end, Nvidia will provide research support through its AI Technology Center, start-up assistance through its Inception program, and training and certification via its Deep Learning Institute. Cisco will also provide training through the Cisco Networking Academy as part of its commitment to equip 500,000 Indonesians by 2030.
“With the support of global partners, we’re accelerating Indonesia’s path to economic growth by ensuring Indonesians are not just users of AI, but creators and innovators,” said Vikram Sinha, president director and CEO of Indosat in a joint statement. “This initiative will translate into a commitment to develop talent, build national capabilities, and shape a future where Indonesia leads in AI – not follows.”
