Indosat: How AI Investments are Fulfilling Digital Ambitions

Indosat is fast transforming itself from a conventional telecommunications operator into an AI-native national platform, deploying AI grid infrastructure, a sovereign cloud and a domestically-developed LLM to deliver "AI for all" across Indonesia.

At the latest instalment of MWC in Barcelona, President Director and CEO Vikram Sinha explained how these investments are translating into measurable improvements in customer experience, national capability and digital inclusion throughout the archipelago nation.

The 58-year-old brand, which already connects almost 200 million customers across 17,000 islands, positions its AI push as the next evolution in its journey. Following the company's merger into Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the operator gained the scale to rethink its role, establishing what it calls an 'AI North Star' built on three pillars.

"We mean it when we say our larger purpose is empowering Indonesia," Vikram said. "Indonesia is on a journey of becoming a developed nation. Research reports show that AI can be a great enabler. In the early days, all the talk was about building infrastructure – roads and highways – but now it is all about building digital infrastructure. This is mission-critical for a country like Indonesia."

This ambition is supported by aggressive infrastructure plans, including GPU-powered data centres starting from 10 MW of live capacity and targeting up to 1 GW by 2030. The strategy leverages Indonesia's relatively low-cost power, land and water to host regional AI workloads.

Embedding AI across operations

For Vikram, scale is only meaningful if it translates into value for people and the company's P&L statement.

"If I am not performing well on my core business, I have no right to start a new business," he continued, explaining why AI is being embedded across core operations rather than treated as a side project.

Indosat is already using AI for hyper-personalised offers, smarter distribution to 300,000 retail outlets and grid-level capital expenditure allocation, which is helping it grow faster while reducing churn.

At the centre of Indosat's population-scale AI vision sits Sahabat AI, a sovereign LLM and platform trained on local, sensitive data and tuned for Indonesia's linguistic and cultural nuance. Rather than competing with global models, Vikram says Sahabat is designed to complement them.

"We are not trying to compete with ChatGPT or Gemini," he explained. "We are focused on making sure that it understands all languages. We want to make sure that it understands the cultural nuances and understands the real insights. We want to collaborate with ChatGPT and Perplexity at a certain level, but what we want to focus on is the sovereign sensitive data which it is getting trained on and all the local language cultural provision."

Building a sovereign LLM

Sahabat is already being applied to real-world problems. One of the first at-scale use cases is spam and scam detection, developed in partnership with Tala and trained on Indosat's AI factory infrastructure. In just six months, the service has blocked close to a billion spam and scam incidents and flagged millions of bad actors.

"As a telco, our job is not only to connect, but also to protect," Vikram went on. "This is the first use case where we are using AI to solve a real problem at scale. Giving core connectivity is no longer what our role is. If I'm giving you connectivity, I need to give you peace of mind that I'm giving you security, too."

Another major theme for Indosat at MWC was the operator's AI-Grid vision of evolving from centralised AI factories to a distributed grid of 55,000 AI factories at the edge, powered by AI-RAN. This approach, developed with Nokia and NVIDIA, allows radio access network and AI workloads to share GPU infrastructure across Indosat's nationwide footprint.

"When we started this journey, it was not about creating more efficiency, but moving up from AI RAN to AI grid," Vikram reflected. "That has been the focus. From proof of concept, we are now in the place where we are getting ready to scale up. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for telcos like us to move from just doing connectivity to doing connectivity plus compute, which is intelligence, and to do it at the edge in a sovereign manner."

Distributed intelligence at scale

This further emphasises Vikram's belief that infrastructure only matters if it creates visible value for users and the wider economy.

Indosat's AI strategy is tightly linked to national ambitions and ecosystem development. The company is a core partner in Indonesia's AI Center of Excellence and in AI Experience Centres from Solo Technopark to Jayapura, ensuring eastern and rural regions are part of the AI story from the outset.

"Our approach is AI for all and we are trying to be the great equaliser," Vikram said.

However, he is clear that technology alone is not enough: "We've been on a journey in terms of democratising intelligence. We very strongly believe that AI is a great equaliser. We are looking at AI from a growth mindset – how it can empower humans, how humans can lead. When I talk about AI for Indosat, that has been the approach – investing in talent, helping every employee unlock their full potential and unlock growth. The same is happening at a country level. This has been our journey."