Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison announced on Tuesday that it’s ready to integrate Nvidia’s new Blackwell platform into its infrastructure in the hopes of helping Indonesia develop sovereign AI and spur growth in AI cloud services.
On Monday, Nvidia revealed its Blackwell GPU architecture, which is billed as the “engine to power this new industrial revolution” of generative AI. Nvidia says the Blackwell platform enables organizations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models “at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor.”
Apart from generative AI, the platform also promises to unlock breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design and quantum computing.
Indosat said it will leverage Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs based on the Blackwell platform to deliver “a massive speedup to inference workloads, making real-time performance possible for resource-intensive, multitrillion-parameter language models.”
The Nvidia Tensor Core GPU, which includes Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, will also enable cloud network acceleration, composable storage, zero-trust security, and GPU compute elasticity in hyperscale AI clouds, Indosat said.
The GPU will be available on Nvidia DGX Cloud, the chip firm’s AI supercomputing service that gives enterprises access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced generative AI models.
The announcement comes on the heels of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Indosat and Nvidia at last month’s Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona to collaborate on establishing Indonesia as a leading player in the AI sector.
Indosat president director and CEO Vikram Sinha said that integrating the Blackwell platform into its infrastructure will supercharge Indosat’s business ecosystem and help its business customers across various industries harness the full potential of AI and machine learning to drive productivity, efficiency, and innovation.
“With Blackwell technology at our fingertips, we are one step closer to our larger purpose of empowering Indonesia and leading the charge in sovereign AI, driving innovation, economic growth, and prosperity for future generations,” he said.
Under the MoU signed at MWC, Indosat subsidiary Lintasarta aims to provide GPU-as-a-Service (Deka GPU) and give customers access to AI capabilities specifically tailored for high-demand computing tasks, including infrastructure, platform, and bare metal services.
“Adding NVIDIA’s latest technology into our service portfolio supports us in our journey to becoming one of the leading cloud service providers in the nation, helping us expand our network even further,” said Lintasarta president director and CEO Bayu Hanantasena on Tuesday.
Ronnie Vasishta, senior VP of telecom at Nvidia, added that integrating the Blackwell platform into Indosat’s infrastructure will lay the groundwork for Indonesia to assert itself as a global leader in sovereign AI.
“Sovereign AI is increasingly becoming top of mind for nations seeking to turbocharge innovation and increase productivity,” he said. “By integrating the Blackwell platform, Indosat is poised to redefine its business and drive the development of large language models that will help empower Indonesia with generative AI.”
Nvidia said Blackwell-based products will be available from partners starting later this year. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be among the first cloud service providers to offer Blackwell-powered instances, along with Nvidia Cloud Partner program companies Applied Digital, CoreWeave, Crusoe, IBM Cloud and Lambda.
Nvidia also said that Indosat will be one of several companies creating “Sovereign AI clouds” to provide Blackwell-based cloud services and infrastructure. Others include Nebius, Nexgen Cloud, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, Scaleway, Singtel, Northern Data Group’s Taiga Cloud, Yotta Data Services’ Shakti Cloud and YTL Power International, as well as the Oracle US, UK, and Australian Government Clouds.