Jakarta. Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia recently gave his take on why US chipmaker Nvidia and Indonesian telco firm Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison chose to build their artificial intelligence (AI) center in the Central Java city of Solo.

Earlier this month, Communications Minister Budi Arie Setiadi revealed Nvidia and Indosat planned to set up an AI center worth $200 million in Solo Technopark this year. The center would consist of telecommunication infrastructure and digital talent development. 

In a press briefing on Monday, Bahlil admitted that he had not spoken with the said companies regarding their AI center plan. The minister, however, said that it could be Solo’s robust infrastructure development --coupled with its innovation center--that made them pick the city.

“Solo has been witnessing incredible progress, be it from the number of tourists traveling into the city or its infrastructure development. Solo has been developing its infrastructure aggressively if we compare it to the previous years,” Bahlil told the press. 

“Solo has a toll road that lets people travel from and to Jakarta within 6 hours. This becomes the mid-point between Semarang, East Java, and Yogyakarta. It is possible that Indosat [and Nvidia] consider this development as one of the parameters in their feasibility studies,” the minister said. 

The city is also home to what it calls the Solo Technopark. This city's government-owned facility is a vocational and innovation center. The technopark’s official website shows that it offers training in manufacturing and automation, among other things.

Bahlil added: “Another possible factor is the certainty offered by the sub-national government’s proposals. The Solo government could be presenting a proposal that was better compared to other sub-national governments. … And the technopark could give Solo an upper hand [compared to other regions in Indonesia].”

In February, Nvidia and Indosat inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to boost Indonesia’s AI infrastructure. 

According to the press release at the time, Indosat and its subsidiary Lintasarta will bring Nvidia’s full-stack AI platform to enterprises across the region. 

They will offer access to Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU) technologies with high-density data centers that are connected to the public internet at up to 400 Gbps. At a later stage, Indosat and Lintasarta’s Nvidia-powered AI cloud services will develop a “new generation of sustainable, hyper-connected AI-ready data centers”. Indosat said it would leverage its data centers to enable “a sovereign AI platform”, the press release wrote.