The latest proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the telecommunications industry has landed in Indonesia, with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (Indosat) announcing what it calls a “landmark” initiative to deploy an AI-based radio access network (RAN) infrastructure across the country.
Indosat, which is regarded as a frontrunner in AI-driven comms, has the stated vision to become the preferred digital telecommunications company in Indonesia. Together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, Indosat provides cellular services, ICT solutions, datacentres and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), electronic payment services, financial services and other digital services.
The AI-RAN announcement sees it become the first operator in Southeast Asia and the third globally to build a commercial AI-RAN network, enabling the convergence of AI and wireless connectivity to enhance performance and efficiency, and unlock new opportunities across industries.
This initiative aligns with Indonesia’s national AI strategy, positioning Indosat as both a connectivity provider and an AI service enabler. Indosat has built a sovereign AI factory in Indonesia to enable enterprises, startups and government entities to create local AI applications across healthcare, education and agriculture. With the new AI-RAN infrastructure, the company plans to serve AI inferencing needs and supercharge the AI ecosystem for more than 277 million people.
The project is being made possible by working with Nokia and Nvidia with the parties having entered into an memorandum of understanding to develop, test and deploy the AI-RAN solution, with an initial focus on bringing AI inferencing workloads on Nvidia AI Aerial, followed by the integration of RAN workloads on the same platform. The integration also brings together Nokia’s 5G Cloud RAN solution and the Nvidia AI Aerial platform to create a unified accelerated computing infrastructure for hosting AI and RAN workloads.
The deployment will follow a phased approach, starting with the establishment of a 5G AI-RAN lab in Surabaya in early 2025 for joint development, testing and validation. A small-scale commercial pilot of AI inferencing workloads running on Nvidia AI-RAN infrastructure is planned in the second half of 2025. Further expansion of this solution deployment will happen in 2026.
As part of this initiative, Indosat, Nokia and Nvidia will work with leading Indonesian universities and research institutions to drive AI-RAN development. This collaboration will also support academic programmes to boost AI innovation in comms applications and provide hands-on opportunities for students and researchers to contribute to next-generation AI-powered networks. By engaging with academia, the companies are looking to accelerate breakthroughs in AI-driven network optimisation, spectral efficiency and energy consumption.
Indosat will use the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform and serverless application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable optimised inferencing for an array of applications and AI workload distribution across central and distributed infrastructure, and allow the operator to bring AI capabilities to every application. The serverless API capabilities, built with Nvidia, will enable Indosat AI application partners – including Hippocratic.ai, Personal.ai, GoTo and Accenture – to use distributed inference engines to provide AI tokens at scale ensuring a more consistent experience.
Ultimately, the tech firms believe the approach they take will enable Indosat to revolutionise its network capabilities and business model, and that by sharing infrastructure costs across multiple applications, Indosat can maximise its return on investment while unlocking new revenue streams through a wide range of AI-driven services. Moreover, they are confident the deployment will achieve transformative gains in network performance, spectral efficiency and energy consumption, setting the stage for a software-driven 6G upgrade.
Commenting on the project and what he believes the operator can gain, Vikram Sinha, president director and CEO of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, said: “This collaboration marks a transformative milestone for Indonesia’s telecommunications industry. By embedding AI into our radio access network, we’re not just enhancing connectivity – we’re building a nationwide AI-powered ecosystem that will fuel innovation across industries. This aligns seamlessly with our mission to connect and empower every Indonesian.”