Indosat and Nvidia and Gadjah Mada University launch the first university AI center in Indonesia to support technological sovereignty

The Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs in Indonesia, in cooperation with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nvidia and Gadjah Mada University, opened the first AI technology center on a university campus in Yogyakarta, under the umbrella of the National AI Center of Excellence initiative. This three-way partnership between government, industry and academia aims to direct AI tools toward addressing urgent national priorities, and to build local competencies capable of turning research into tangible solutions.

The Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs, Mutia Hafiz, said this step reflects a long-term vision that seeks to move Indonesia from being merely a consumer and adopter of technologies to a state that develops innovations and contributes them globally. She noted that establishing the foundations of digital sovereignty in AI represents a main driver of economic growth and of enhancing national competitiveness. For her part, Dr. Ova Emilia, rector of Gadjah Mada University, affirmed the university's commitment to supporting these aspirations by linking education and academic research with field application and by training national cadres.

The new center relies on Nvidia's full supercomputing platform and the GPU Merdeka platform, a sovereign cloud-computing service for graphics processors provided by Indosat. This infrastructure gives researchers and students access to accelerated computing capabilities at enterprise standards, advanced software, and open pre-trained models including Nvidia's Neuron models, as well as development frameworks, technical guidance, and connections to a global network of experts. Vikram Senha, chief executive officer of Indosat, said the initiative aims to ensure that no segment of Indonesian society falls behind the technological transformation, and to broaden access for researchers and start-ups in the world's fourth-largest country by population.

The center identified three initial applied projects focusing on the health, agriculture and natural disaster management sectors.In the health sector, Indonesia records more than one million new tuberculosis cases each year, and early detection remains a major challenge in rural areas because of a lack of equipment and expertise at the community level. A team from the university's faculty of medicine, public health and nursing, led by Dr. Dian Kisuma Pramodia Nurputra, is conducting the eNose-TB project, an electronic screening device that uses artificial intelligence to analyze breath samples and provide a rapid, low-cost diagnosis in rural clinics without the need for expensive laboratories or specialist doctors.

In the agricultural sector, which employs roughly 30 % of the country's workforce, the SmartAgri project employs multimodal AI, merging satellite imagery with sensor data and local agricultural knowledge through edge computing to deliver precise recommendations to smallholder farmers on irrigation timing and methods.This integration of edge computing with field data enhances the capacity of local agricultural production to adapt and remain sustainable.

Given Indonesia's geographic location on the Pacific Ring of Fire and its exposure to frequent natural disasters, the Tech4Disaster project is developing a spatial geographic platform that uses accelerated computing to process satellite and sensor data at very high speed. This system gives emergency response teams and local communities early-warning systems and rapid coordination tools to raise field readiness when disasters strike, turning sovereign computing resources into a direct technical shield that protects the population and the local environment.