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Indonesia is on its way to the realization of its quest for digital sovereignty, as Sahabat-AI makes a historic step in open-source collaboration, made in terms of enhancing the nation’s AI capabilities. A partnership meant to empower more than 277 million Indonesian speakers, between local industry leaders and global giants such as NVIDIA, will be seen bearing fruit as Indonesia becomes the next leader in sovereign AI development, stepping into the promotion of its very own “gotong royong” concept- that was executed on the model of mutual cooperation.
Establishing Sovereign AI for Indonesia
Sahabat-AI consists of a suite of large language models (LLMs) that understand and produce content in Bahasa Indonesia and other local languages. Creating these models locally would help the initiative ensure that the AI applications generated are culturally relevant towards Indonesia’s moves toward digital independence. This will thus enable the local industries, government agencies, universities, and research centers to develop generative AI solutions unique to the needs of the country.
Speaking on the democratizing power of AI, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang said, “Artificial intelligence will democratize technology. It is the great equalizer.” He underlined the transformative impact this would bring to society and how societies could make themselves more empowered. “By setting this path forward toward a future where technology is for everyone”-fueling growth, innovation, and inclusivity-is the Indonesia journey through the Sahabat-AI initiative.
A Powerful Collaboration with Industry Leaders
It launches Sahabat-AI at Indonesia AI Day, Jakarta: Present during the event were keynote players in the country’s tech ecosystem, including Indonesia Minister for State-Owned Enterprises Erick Thohir, the top executives from major companies such as Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), GoTo, and Accenture.
In line with this initiative, IOH introduced “GPU Merdeka by Lintasarta” earlier this year under this program. This sovereign AI cloud, running NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure, is operated from the BDx Indonesia AI data center; its power is sourced from renewable energy. With NVIDIA’s infrastructure, IOH was able to establish the high-performance AI cloud in under three months, contributing to the acceleration of the nation’s AI-driven transformation.
The collaboration with the NCP program of NVIDIA was crucial for giving IOH access to blueprints for leading high-performance data centers, cutting-edge AI software, and platforms. This partnership is also helping local industries in sectors like energy, financial services, and healthcare harness the power of AI for greater efficiency and innovation.
Tuning AI for Specific Industry Applications
What’s exciting in itself with Sahabat-AI is that this initiative caters to an exact industry. Jointly partnering Accenture, a global consulting company, with IOH developing industry-specific AI solutions for the financial services sector of the country, the capability in this platform construction on NVIDIA AI Enterprise’s software solution is available with ready-made applications to help banks and other financial institutions cut across their most inefficient processes and drive profitable growth through the power of AI.
The architecture of such solutions is designed modularly, so they can be easily adaptable to a business at whatever its levels of growth might be at any stage on their AI journey. This encourages sustainable growth and ensures sovereignty of data governance by securing sensitive information and keeping it under local control.
Developing Citizen Services with AI Chatbots
Another very significant influence Sahabat-AI has on the public service sector is when Tech Mahindra-a global systems integrator, collaborated with IOH in developing an AI-powered chatbot. The aim of this chatbot is to provide answers to the queries of Indonesians regarding information on services relating to updates of national identity cards, tax charges, and payment procedures. This is just one example of how Sahabat-AI is enriching the experience of users in accessing vital services.
To fine-tune the Llama 3 8B model, Indosat has specifically designed the AI to be running well within the Indonesian environment, thus ensuring better communication with its users. Its better performance is enabled through NVIDIA’s NIM microservices that increase data throughput up to 2.5 times, thus interacting more swiftly and responsively.
AI Revolutionizes Healthcare
Sahabat-AI is revolutionizing healthcare in Indonesia. Hippocratic AI is one of the major healthcare AI companies where the Sahabat-AI models are used to develop digital agents that can interpret and respond to patients with affective, human-like conversation. This helps healthcare professionals offload administrative tasks and attend to critical care as the other tasks, such as paper work, are tackled by agents powered by AI. The NVIDIA provides faster and efficient processing that ensures protection for patient data and provides quality care in health.
The Future of Sovereign AI in Indonesia
This infrastructure that has become foundational for these innovations—IOH’s AI cloud powered by NVIDIA technologies—serves as a model for sustainable and scalable AI development. Green, renewable energy infrastructure is the blueprint, and this certainly matches the vision that Indonesia has for a future digital landscape: sustainable. Through this AI factory model, companies, government entities, and new startups will gain the opportunity to develop, deploy, and adapt culturally relevant AI applications, which are also technologically advanced.
Looking forward, the subsidiary of IOH, Lintasarta, will further expand its AI factory and invest more in the latest NVIDIA technologies, supporting growth in the digital ecosystem of Indonesia. These advancements will be strategic in helping bring about Indonesia’s goals toward achieving its ambitious Golden Indonesia 2045 initiative, where Indonesia will seek to be identified as one of the global leaders in AI and digital technology.
Beyond Indonesia, Sahabat-AI stands as an example for other nations to take the route of developing sovereign AI with roots in local language and culture. NIM microservices, NeMo, and NeMo Guardrails already support many sovereign AI models from regions like India, Japan, and Taiwan in the outreach of this transformational technology by NVIDIA.
source : nvidia
