Indosat partners with Google Cloud to enhance Indonesia's AI tech

Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison Group and Google Cloud have announced an expanded partnership to deliver next-generation sovereign cloud and edge cloud services in Indonesia, tailored to meet the country's stringent data residency, security, and privacy requirements. This initiative aims to benefit Indonesia's public sector and critical industries by enabling them to utilise Google Cloud's advanced capabilities while complying with national security laws.

Under the terms of the partnership, Indosat Group plans to offer Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) to Indonesian organisations to meet the unique demands of AI and data-intensive workloads at their preferred locations. This service is expected to assist sectors such as defence, healthcare, financial services, energy, and manufacturing in accelerating digital transformation with advanced AI and analytics capabilities, while ensuring complete control and protection of sensitive data.

GDC is a fully managed solution offering a rich set of software services, extensible hardware form factors, and options to operate air-gapped—entirely disconnected from the public internet—for the most sensitive workloads, or connected between edge locations and the Google Cloud region in Indonesia.

Indosat Group, through its data centre operations, plans to provide hosting options for GDC on-premises. This ensures data remains under customer control and within Indonesia's borders, thereby adhering to local legal and sovereignty frameworks, including the Personal Data Protection Law and Government Regulation No. 71.

Vikram Sinha, President Director and Chief Executive Officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison Group, commented, "Indonesia is paving the way towards its golden era in 2045. Indosat Group is committed to contributing through technological advancements in pursuit of this vision. The partnership with Google Cloud is driven by empowering Indonesia, aiming to deliver the country's first sovereign cloud and edge cloud solutions."

Sinha emphasised that these solutions are designed to equip organisations with the advanced infrastructure, operational features, and developer tools necessary for large-scale digitalisation. Through GDC, organisations can access key features of Vertex AI—Google Cloud's enterprise AI platform—to quickly develop and deploy advanced machine learning (ML) and generative AI search applications for data retrieval and analysis at their chosen locations. Additionally, pre-trained ML models for Speech-to-Text, translation, and optical character recognition (OCR) with support for more than 100 languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, are readily accessible.

Organisations will also have access to a broader range of Google Cloud hardware and software resources essential for seamless AI application deployment in an air-gapped environment or at the edge. These resources include Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, the portable AlloyDB Omni database engine, and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics.

Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer of Google Cloud, remarked, "Indonesia's public sector and regulated industries require solutions that meet strict data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. Our partnership with Indosat Group will introduce next-generation, local sovereign cloud and edge cloud solutions to empower public sector and regulated organisations to accelerate digital transformation on their own terms. Our leading AI services and secure-by-design distributed cloud infrastructure, combined with Indosat's technology expertise, will help businesses better analyse data, uncover insights, boost productivity, and run modern AI applications."