Chipmaking leader Nvidia is planning a $200 million AI center in Indonesia in partnership with the country’s second-largest mobile telecom provider, as it expands into Southeast Asia.
The AI center will be based in Surakarta, a city in Indonesia’s Central Java province, Budi Arie Setiadi, communication and information technology minister of Indonesia said, according to a CNBC translation. He added the center will improve local telecom infrastructure, and support human resources and digital talent.
In March, Indonesian telecom giant Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nvidia’s partner for the AI center, announced it was “ready to integrate the NVIDIA Blackwell platform into its infrastructure, with the goal of propelling Indonesia into a new era of sovereign AI and technological advancement.” Adopting the new Blackwell platform would help the company “solidify a paradigm shift in how Indonesia harnesses the power of AI and machine learning to drive innovation, economic growth, and national sovereignty,” it said.
Nvidia declined to comment on the plans, and Indosat did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The partnership with Indosat on the AI center follows other Nvidia partnerships in the region, including with Singapore’s Singtel, which announced in late January it was working with Nvidia to advance AI development and accessibility in the country. Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed that $2.7 billion, or 15% of its revenue, for the quarter came from Singapore.
The chipmaker, which became the first in the semiconductor industry to reach a $2 trillion market cap earlier this year, beat Wall Street expectations when it reported revenues of $22 billion in its fourth quarter — up nearly 270% from the previous year. Its growth was mostly driven by its high-in-demand H100 chips that power AI chatbots like ChatGPT. At the company’s annual GPU Technology Conference in March, Nvidia unveiled its new Blackwell platform, including the new B200 chip that promises faster, more powerful capabilities than faster than its predecessor.