\u201cWhat gets solved in the U.S. or China might not work in Indonesia,\u201d he told Fortune <\/em>in early April, pointing to the country\u2019s different culture and languages. That leaves the space open for companies like Indosat: \u201cWe\u2019re in a pole position to see how we can deliver connectivity plus compute\u2013or intelligence\u2013to millions of people all over the world in a sovereign manner,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Sinha is betting that the next phase of AI\u2014running models near the end user, in local languages for local problems\u2014will belong to telecom companies like Indosat in the so-called Global South. Indosat\u2019s 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\u2019s startups, underpinned by an Indonesian large language model that he argues will avoid the blind spots of a U.S.- or Chinese-trained model.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, even Sinha wondered whether he could turn \u201csovereignty\u201d into a business. \u201cIf I ask my team whether they can make a business case for Sahabat? They don\u2019t know how,\u201d he admitted.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s eastern coast. He then moved to another island nation, leading Ooredoo\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n What Sinha recalled from his time in Myanmar is the average age of his team: 27 years old, all \u201cyoung guys,\u201d in his words. Yet he felt his time in the country was a rewarding experience. \u201cWhen I was going to Myanmar, people warned me about the competency gap,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you invest in getting the best out of people, you see a lot of talent.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s previous time as a state-owned enterprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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?\u201d Sinha explained. \u201cWhen investors and analysts look at mergers, they only talk about synergies, but employees and customers don\u2019t care about that. They care about growth and experience.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s performance was weaker in the first half of the year, only for things to turn around in the second half.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/em>\u2018s conversation with Sinha). Indosat also achieved its highest average revenue per user (ARPU) since the merger, at 45,000 rupiah ($2.59).\u00a0<\/p>\n In his earnings briefing to analysts, Sinha highlighted Indosat\u2019s new partnership with Google, offering the U.S. tech company\u2019s Gemini AI product to its users. \u201cWe see a lot more opportunity on ARPU upside,\u201d Sinha told analysts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, Indosat\u2019s shares are down by 9% for the year. That\u2019s still better than the broader market, which is in a months-long slump over worries of a downgrade to \u201cfrontier market\u201d status.\u00a0(The Jakarta Composite Index is down by 17% since the beginning of the year)<\/p>\n Indonesia\u2019s tech sector has been in a longer funk. Investors were once hot on the country\u2019s potential to serve hundreds of millions of young, upwardly-mobile, digitally-savvy Indonesians. That optimism has since faded. \u201cThe problem is there were a lot of unicorn startups,\u201d Sinha said. \u201cThey were chasing the wrong metrics. They were all on the valuation game.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat mindset has to change. We have to build businesses around more sustainable models with things that are more real,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n Indosat is pushing into every layer of Jensen Huang\u2019s \u201cAI layer cake\u201c, the framework Nvidia\u2019s 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\u2019s AI factory, anchored by a cluster of Nvidia\u2019s H100 processors, has already attracted customers across banking and mining.<\/p>\n \u201cInferencing needs to happen close to the edge,\u201d Sinha said, referring to the deployment of AI models close to end-users rather than in centralized data centers. \u201cTelcos 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Countries like Indonesia have structural advantages here that the West lacks, Sinha argued. \u201cCountries like Indonesia have power, land and water. Today in Indonesia, I\u2019m sitting with close to 800 megawatts of approved power,\u201d he said. \u201cThe U.S. doesn\u2019t have power.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he admits that raw infrastructure is not enough. \u201cWithout human capital, you will never become sovereign,\u201d Sinha said. \u201cSovereignty is not only about investment or money.\u201d<\/p>\n Sahabat AI lies at the center of Indosat\u2019s 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. (\u201cSahabat\u201d is a Bahasa word that means \u201cclose friend.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n The case for a locally built model is straightforward, at least in principle. \u201cThe LLM is not neutral. And if it is not in your language, it will have bias, cultural nuances and all,\u201d Sinha said. \u201cEvery country will focus on protecting the data and cultural sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n Several other countries are trying to build their own local models. Korea\u2019s Naver is developing Korean-language models, while AI Singapore\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a practical reason too, beyond the principled one. \u201cThe ability for governments, banks, and other regulated entities to use AI relies on accuracy,\u201d 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. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have accuracy, and people are speaking in a language that models don\u2019t understand, then you don\u2019t have a use case.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s challenging to build models in languages that don\u2019t boast a lot of material. \u201cLow resource, by definition, means there\u2019s not enough data to build a large language model with natural language processing,\u201d Ting says. The designation has nothing to do with the number of speakers\u2014Bahasa Indonesia is spoken by nearly 300 million people\u2014but with the volume of digitized text, which is small for most languages. <\/p>\n For Sinha, Sahabat looks a bit more like a public service than a business, at least initially. He called it a \u201cplatform to innovate and collaborate,\u201d helping to bolster Indonesia\u2019s new AI startups. \u201cWe have not promoted this in a manner where we are driving daily and monthly users,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are very confident that a business case will emerge. But yes, there will be doubts in the early days,\u201d he admitted. \u201cYou have to go all in and make sure you believe in it.\u201d<\/p>\n In Fortune\u2019s \u201cAsia Agenda\u201d column, released twice a month, we speak with Asia\u2019s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they\u2019ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world\u2019s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore\u00a0all of our profiles here.<\/em><\/p>\n #Indosat #CEO #building #Indonesian #languages #business #case<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is there room in the global AI race for anyone other than the United States and China? Vikram Sinha, the CEO of Indonesia\u2019s second-largest mobile carrier, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH),… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3739,1548,283,2122,369,3740,3743,3742,3744,3741],"class_list":["post-2073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-asia-agenda","tag-building","tag-business","tag-case","tag-ceo","tag-indonesia","tag-indonesian","tag-indosat","tag-languages","tag-southeast-asia-500"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From India to Indonesia, via Yangon<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Outperforming a down market<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Building the AI stack<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Your friendly AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4ad97fe6-dc0f-419a-9868-f24a46f62fa4.jpeg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n