Indonesia’s Sovereign AI Play

One of the major trends in the AI industry in the past year was the growth of sovereign AI, the movement by various countries to develop their own domestic AI capabilities to reduce their technological dependence on the U.S. and China. 

While an increasing number of nations and regions are building their own large language models and AI data centers, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country behind India, China and the U.S., is among the most active. In November 2024, major Indonesian telecom operator Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and local tech firm GoTo launched Sahabat-AI, an open-source LLM they developed for Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s official language. In June, the companies announced a larger upgraded version of the LLM, along with a new multilingual chat service. 

“If you only allow a large language model built by the U.S. or China, it will have bias—100%, it will have bias,” said Indosat CEO Vikram Sinha in a recent interview. If other countries like Indonesia don’t accelerate their efforts to develop their own AI models and applications now, they will become mere “consumption markets” for AI, he said.