Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indosat and NVIDIA Open Indonesia’s First University AI Center to Develop Local AI Talent

Indonesia has opened its first university-based AI technology center, and it’s not trying to be a showcase with no follow-through. The new UGM Indosat NVIDIA AI Technology Center launched this week in Yogyakarta, bringing together the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, NVIDIA and Universitas Gadjah Mada under the country’s AI Center of Excellence plan.

The pitch is straightforward: build AI at home for problems that hit Indonesia first and hardest. Minister Meutya Hafid framed the center as part of a longer effort to make the country not just a user of AI, but a place that creates and exports it. UGM’s Prof. dr. Ova Emilia put the university side on the same track, pointing to education, research and talent development.

The center gives UGM researchers and students access to NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform and Indosat’s GPU Merdeka, its sovereign GPU-as-a-service platform. That means enterprise-grade accelerated computing, software, open source tools, pretrained models, development frameworks and technical mentorship. It also plugs Indonesian researchers into a wider network of expertise, which matters when the bottleneck has often been compute rather than ideas.

And the source is clear that the need is not abstract. Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most populous country, and the center is starting with three projects in healthcare, agriculture and disaster response. One team is building eNose-TB, an AI screening system that analyzes breath samples to help detect tuberculosis in remote clinics and villages without a specialist or expensive lab. Another, SmartAgri, combines satellite imagery, sensor data and local farming knowledge to guide irrigation. A third, Tech4Disaster, is using geospatial AI to process satellite and sensor data faster so communities and responders get earlier warning and better coordination when disaster hits.

NVIDIA says it’s using Nemotron open models in the center, while Indosat says the goal is to widen access for researchers, students, startups and innovators across the country. That’s the real test here: whether this becomes a working pipeline for local AI talent, or just another glossy partnership photo with better lighting.