Is there room in the global AI race for anyone other than the United States and China? Vikram Sinha, the CEO of Indonesia’s second-largest mobile carrier, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), thinks there has to be.
“What gets solved in the U.S. or China might not work in Indonesia,” he told Fortune in early April, pointing to the country’s different culture and languages. That leaves the space open for companies like Indosat: “We’re in a pole position to see how we can deliver connectivity plus compute–or intelligence–to millions of people all over the world in a sovereign manner,” he continued.
Sovereign AI has become the buzzword of choice for just about every government concerned about leaving the AI space solely to U.S. and Chinese labs like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI.
Sinha is betting that the next phase of AI—running models near the end user, in local languages for local problems—will belong to telecom companies like Indosat in the so-called Global South. Indosat’s CEO, who came to Indonesia after working in India, the Seychelles, and Myanmar, is eager to drive that development through Sahabat AI, a platform for the country’s startups, underpinned by an Indonesian large language model that he argues will avoid the blind spots of a U.S.- or Chinese-trained model.
Still, even Sinha wondered whether he could turn “sovereignty” into a business. “If I ask my team whether they can make a business case for Sahabat? They don’t know how,” he admitted.
From India to Indonesia, via Yangon
Sinha, born in Jamshedpur in eastern India, joined the telecoms business in 2005 with a job at Bharti Airtel. Seven years later, the company dispatched him, at just 37 years old, to lead its business in the Seychelles, a tiny island nation of just 120,000 people off Africa’s eastern coast. He then moved to another island nation, leading Ooredoo’s business in the Maldives, then went on to Myanmar, right as the Southeast Asian country was in the midst of its (ultimately short-lived) democratization and opening.
What Sinha recalled from his time in Myanmar is the average age of his team: 27 years old, all “young guys,” in his words. Yet he felt his time in the country was a rewarding experience. “When I was going to Myanmar, people warned me about the competency gap,” he said. “But if you invest in getting the best out of people, you see a lot of talent.”
In 2021, Ooredoo tapped Sinha to lead the newly formed IOH, created from a merger between Indosat and Hutchison 3 Indonesia, owned by Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison. Ooredoo and CK Hutchison together own a 65.6% stake in IOH; the Indonesian government has a 9.6% stake, a holdover from Indosat’s previous time as a state-owned enterprise.
Most mergers disappoint, with the consulting firm McKinsey estimating that as many as 70% of such deals fail to live up to their promises. (Sinha puts the number even higher, claiming that 95% of telecoms mergers fail). Indosat, however, is an exception, with the company continuing to grow its revenue, profits and user base in its post-deal years.
“The number one guiding principle we wanted to follow was to look at the merger from a maximize, not optimize, outlook: How could we make one plus one equal 11?” Sinha explained. “When investors and analysts look at mergers, they only talk about synergies, but employees and customers don’t care about that. They care about growth and experience.”
Outperforming a down market
Indosat reported 56.5 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($3.3 billion) in revenue for 2025, a 1.1% increase over the prior year, while profits climbed 12.2% to 5.5 trillion rupiah ($320 million). But those numbers mask a tough year: Sinha notes that the company’s performance was weaker in the first half of the year, only for things to turn around in the second half.
That strong performance has continued into the first quarter of 2026, with revenue jumping by 12.1% year-on-year. (Indosat released its Q1 earnings on April 29, after Fortune‘s conversation with Sinha). Indosat also achieved its highest average revenue per user (ARPU) since the merger, at 45,000 rupiah ($2.59).
In his earnings briefing to analysts, Sinha highlighted Indosat’s new partnership with Google, offering the U.S. tech company’s Gemini AI product to its users. “We see a lot more opportunity on ARPU upside,” Sinha told analysts.
Still, Indosat’s shares are down by 9% for the year. That’s still better than the broader market, which is in a months-long slump over worries of a downgrade to “frontier market” status. (The Jakarta Composite Index is down by 17% since the beginning of the year)
Indonesia’s tech sector has been in a longer funk. Investors were once hot on the country’s potential to serve hundreds of millions of young, upwardly-mobile, digitally-savvy Indonesians. That optimism has since faded. “The problem is there were a lot of unicorn startups,” Sinha said. “They were chasing the wrong metrics. They were all on the valuation game.”
“That mindset has to change. We have to build businesses around more sustainable models with things that are more real,” he added.
Building the AI stack
Indosat is pushing into every layer of Jensen Huang’s “AI layer cake“, the framework Nvidia’s CEO uses to describe the hierarchy of AI infrastructure, from energy and chips through to infrastructure, models and then finally applications. The company is working with Nvidia to offer GPU-as-a-service, providing on-demand processing power to Indonesian businesses. Indosat’s AI factory, anchored by a cluster of Nvidia’s H100 processors, has already attracted customers across banking and mining.
“Inferencing needs to happen close to the edge,” Sinha said, referring to the deployment of AI models close to end-users rather than in centralized data centers. “Telcos like us can take intelligence to the edge with low latency, and then develop applications which are made in a country, for the country, instead of just buying it from China or the U.S.”
Countries like Indonesia have structural advantages here that the West lacks, Sinha argued. “Countries like Indonesia have power, land and water. Today in Indonesia, I’m sitting with close to 800 megawatts of approved power,” he said. “The U.S. doesn’t have power.”
Still, he admits that raw infrastructure is not enough. “Without human capital, you will never become sovereign,” Sinha said. “Sovereignty is not only about investment or money.”
Your friendly AI
Sahabat AI lies at the center of Indosat’s AI strategy. The open-source large language model, developed with Indonesian ride-hailing and tech giant GoTo, is built around Indonesian languages, including Bahasa Indonesia and Batak. (“Sahabat” is a Bahasa word that means “close friend.”)
The case for a locally built model is straightforward, at least in principle. “The LLM is not neutral. And if it is not in your language, it will have bias, cultural nuances and all,” Sinha said. “Every country will focus on protecting the data and cultural sovereignty.”
Several other countries are trying to build their own local models. Korea’s Naver is developing Korean-language models, while AI Singapore’s SEA-LION initiative has built a family of open-source models for 11 Southeast Asian languages, including Indonesian, built on top of models from Meta, Google and Alibaba.
There’s a practical reason too, beyond the principled one. “The ability for governments, banks, and other regulated entities to use AI relies on accuracy,” explains Pak-Sun Ting, cofounder of Votee AI, a Hong Kong-based startup that has developed an LLM that operates in the Chinese dialect of Cantonese. “If you don’t have accuracy, and people are speaking in a language that models don’t understand, then you don’t have a use case.”
But it’s challenging to build models in languages that don’t boast a lot of material. “Low resource, by definition, means there’s not enough data to build a large language model with natural language processing,” Ting says. The designation has nothing to do with the number of speakers—Bahasa Indonesia is spoken by nearly 300 million people—but with the volume of digitized text, which is small for most languages.
For Sinha, Sahabat looks a bit more like a public service than a business, at least initially. He called it a “platform to innovate and collaborate,” helping to bolster Indonesia’s new AI startups. “We have not promoted this in a manner where we are driving daily and monthly users,” he said.
“We are very confident that a business case will emerge. But yes, there will be doubts in the early days,” he admitted. “You have to go all in and make sure you believe in it.”
In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
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