Artificial Intelligence in Indonesia

Artificial intelligence in Indonesia refers to the development, adoption and governance of AI in Southeast Asia's largest economy, guided by the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2020-2045 (Strategi Nasional Kecerdasan Artifisial, or Stranas KA) and a subsequent national roadmap covering 2025 to 2029. Indonesia has combined long-range policy planning with one of the region's fastest-growing AI infrastructure programmes, and it enacted Southeast Asia's first comprehensive personal data protection statute, Law No. 27 of 2022.^[1][2][4]

History

Indonesia published Stranas KA in August 2020 under the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT, later merged into the National Research and Innovation Agency, BRIN). The strategy set a 25-year horizon aimed at positioning the country as an AI innovation centre by 2045, and identified five priority areas: healthcare, bureaucratic reform, education and research, food security, and mobility and smart cities. It proposed phased implementation, from initial pilots between 2020 and 2024 through capacity building and industrialisation to consolidation by 2045, together with investments in data infrastructure, talent and ethical safeguards.^[1][2]

In September 2025 the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) released a White Paper on the National Artificial Intelligence Roadmap, setting out three action plans covering ecosystem governance, national development priorities and financing models.^[3] The roadmap targets the production of around 100,000 AI talents annually and aims to ensure that 20 million citizens are AI-literate by 2029, with financing stages extending to industries, universities and domestic AI startups.^[4]

By 2026 the government was preparing a Presidential Regulation for a 2026-2029 national AI roadmap to guide ministries and regional administrations in embedding AI into priority programmes, drawing on sovereign funding instruments. Komdigi's minister has also argued publicly that Indonesia should eventually adopt its own specific AI legislation, alongside the data protection framework already in force.^[5][10]

Key Concepts and Technology

Indonesia's AI agenda rests on three pillars: governance, talent and infrastructure. On infrastructure, the country has pursued both foreign investment and state-linked capacity-building. A US$200 million Nvidia AI centre was announced in 2024 in partnership with the telecommunications group Indosat, which has since repositioned itself around AI services, including the GPU Merdeka sovereign AI cloud operated by its subsidiary Lintasarta and an AI Centre of Excellence launched with Nvidia and Cisco in 2025.^[6][7]

The clearest measure of the build-out is in data centres. Government figures put Indonesia's operational data centre capacity at roughly 580 megawatts in mid-2026, with a further 1.3 gigawatts in the pipeline representing US$15-20 billion of investment. The most prominent project is a planned 360-megawatt AI campus on Batam island backed by Nvidia-supported Firmus Technologies and Singapore-based DayOne, designed for up to 170,000 GPUs. The domestic AI market, though smaller than those of China or the United States, has grown quickly, with projections cited by industry analysts pointing to double-digit annual growth through 2030.^[8]

On governance, the Personal Data Protection Law introduced rights for data subjects and obligations for controllers modelled closely on the European Union's GDPR, with a two-year transition period ending in October 2024. A dedicated supervisory agency has been targeted for establishment in the mid-2020s, while sector regulators such as the financial services authority apply additional rules to AI use in their industries.^[9]

Applications and Impact

AI adoption in Indonesia draws on a large domestic digital economy. Consumer platforms, e-commerce and financial technology firms were early adopters of machine learning for credit scoring, fraud detection, recommendations and customer service, and telecommunications operators have moved into providing AI compute and services to enterprises. Stranas KA's priority sectors — health, public administration, education, food security, and mobility and smart cities — remain the main focus of government-backed use cases, including the country's planned new capital, Nusantara.^[1][7]

The scale of the economy creates both opportunity and constraint. Indonesia's digital economy is the largest in Southeast Asia, but analysts note persistent gaps in digital talent and data infrastructure, and the country has recorded a rising number of data breach incidents as digitalisation has accelerated — trends that the PDP Law and the AI roadmap are intended to address.^[8][9]

>See Also

• AI Singapore
• AI Thailand
• AI Vietnam
• ASEAN AI Governance
• SEA-LION
• AI Data Centres Malaysia