Indonesia’s Minister of Communication and Information Technology (Kominfo), Budi Arie Setiadi, has reportedly claimed that Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Nvidia intend to invest in an artificial intelligence (AI) centre in Central Java sometime this year.
According to a Reuters report on Thursday, Setiadi said in a statement that Indosat and Nvidia will invest RM947.5 million (US$200 million) to build the planned AI centre in Surakarta city.
Setiadi also said that Indosat CEO Vikram Sinha has submitted the investment plan to Surakarta mayor Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of President Joko Widodo who also happens to be Indonesia's vice-president elect, the report said.
Setiadi said the two companies picked Surakarta for the site because of its “good human resources and 5G infrastructure”, the report added.
Neither Indosat nor Nvidia have confirmed the statement at post time. However, both companies have recently announced they will collaborate to establish Indonesia as a leading player in the AI sector.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Indosat and Nvidia signed an MoU under which Indosat and its subsidiary, Lintasarta, will bring Nvidia’s full-stack AI platform to enterprises in Indonesia and offer customers access to Nvidia’s GPU technologies with high-density data centres. Indosat and Lintasarta also plan to develop a new generation of sustainable, hyper-connected AI-ready data centres leveraging Nvidia-powered AI Cloud services.
Last month, Indosat announced it will integrate Nvidia’s new Blackwell GPU architecture into its infrastructure with the goal of helping Indonesia develop sovereign AI and spur growth in AI cloud services.
