[JAKARTA] Indonesia will finish work on its first national strategy on artificial intelligence to attract foreign investment next month, officials said as Southeast Asia's largest economy is now taking part in the world's AI and chip-making races.
The move follows the push for neighbouring Malaysia to establish itself as a regional hub for AI development, and has secured billions of dollars from global high-tech companies looking to build critical infrastructure to meet the growing demand for cloud and AI services.
Indonesia's AI Roadmap will be the first comprehensive AI document in the fourth largest country in its population since the 2023 small ethics guidelines.
“The roadmap will help AI developers navigate (the Indonesian market), including infrastructure and computational clusters,” he said, adding that it will detail the adoption of AI in sectors such as health and agriculture.
Nezar said the roadmap is designed to establish the country's AI ecosystem.
“This will give investors ideas about the possibility of AI use in Indonesia,” he said. “I hope they'll be interested in investing capital in Indonesia.”
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A report from the Boston Consulting Group in April predicts that ASEAN countries have earned GDP contributions of 2.3% to 3.1% by 2027, making significant AIS-driven profits, and Indonesia is seeing the best impact in terms of absolute total output growth.
However, despite some investments, Indonesia was slower in development than in other parts of the region.
Nvidia last year was involved in Indonesia's largest tech company Gojek Tokopedia for a large-scale language modeling service and provided chips to telecommunications company IndoSat.
Microsoft also said last year it would invest US$1.7 billion in the coming years in expanding Indonesia's cloud services and AI.
“We are open to all global high-tech companies to enter the Indonesian AI development industry,” Nezar said.
Separately, Indonesia is pitching foreign companies for the critical minerals needed for hardware development to secure a larger share of the global semiconductor supply chain, he added.
Indonesia has provided the US with the opportunity to jointly invest in important mineral projects as part of its tariff negotiations. Washington tried to find an alternative supplier to China that controls the sector, but in April added some rare earths to its list of retaliatory export restrictions on US tariffs.
Damal Jr., analyst at Pikato Democlassi, a research centre that monitors AI safety in Indonesia, said the country is not ready to become an AI developer due to a lack of infrastructure such as chips and the lack of AI skills in the workforce.
Nezar said there remains a risk of misinformation, intellectual property and data leaks. He did not detail how the roadmap would address these issues. Reuters
