Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indosat and NVIDIA Open Indonesia’s First University AI Center to Develop Local AI Talent
| Source: NVIDIA Blog
Tags: NVIDIA, Indonesia, UGM, Indosat, GPU Merdeka, AI sovereignty, Southeast Asia
Indonesia opened its first university-based AI technology center in Yogyakarta — a joint initiative by NVIDIA, Indosat, UGM, and the Ministry of Communication giving local researchers access to sovereign GPU compute and NVIDIA's full AI software stack.
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The UGM Indosat NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) launched in Yogyakarta under Indonesia's national AI Center of Excellence initiative, bringing together the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi), Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, and NVIDIA. The center gives Indonesian researchers and students access to Indosat's GPU Merdeka platform — a sovereign GPU-as-a-service offering — alongside NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack, pretrained models, development frameworks, and technical mentorship. The initiative is framed explicitly around AI sovereignty: Indonesia as a country that develops AI rather than merely consumes it. Minister Meutya Hafid described the center as foundational to 'Indonesia's AI sovereignty and economic growth.' With 270 million people, Indonesia represents a major emerging AI market where compute access has historically been the bottleneck for researchers and startups. For NVIDIA, it extends a growing pattern of sovereign compute partnerships across Southeast Asia and emerging markets. For Indosat, GPU Merdeka positions the telco as more than a connectivity provider — it's entering the cloud AI infrastructure market.