Indosat at MWC: Building an AI-Native Network for Indonesia

Indosat is repositioning itself from a traditional telco into an AI-native national platform with AI grid infrastructure, sovereign cloud and a homegrown LLM all aimed at delivering “AI for all” in Indonesia. 

Speaking at MWC in Barcelona, President Director and CEO Vikram Sinha shared how these investments are already translating into tangible improvements in customer experience, national capability and digital inclusion on the ground.

Shaping Indosat into a AI-native national platform

Indosat’s AI push is the next chapter for the 58-year-old brand that already connects almost 200 million customers across 17,000 islands.

“We mean it when we say our larger purpose is empowering Indonesia,” Vikram says. “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.”

Following the company’s merger into Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the operator gained the scale to rethink its role, setting what it calls an ‘AI North Star’ built on three pillars.

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

​However, for Vikram, scale is only meaningful if it translates into value for people and the P&L. 

“If I am not performing well on my core business, I have no right to start a new business,” he says, underscoring 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 mom‑and‑pop outlets and grid‑level capex allocation, helping it grow faster while reducing churn. 

Introducing Sahabat AI

At the centre of Indosat’s population‑scale AI vision is 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 explains.

“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, et cetera, 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.”

Crucially, 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 continues. “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.”

Bringing compute to the edge

Another major theme for Indosat at MWC was the telco’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 RAN 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 says. “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.”

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

​The importance of skills and partnerships

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 says. 

However, he is clear that technology alone is not enough. 

He adds: “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.”