UGM, Indosat and NVIDIA launch Indonesia’s first university AI center

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, NVIDIA and Universitas Gadjah Mada have opened the UGM Indosat NVIDIA AI Technology Center in Yogyakarta, described as the country’s first university-based AI technology center. Created under Indonesia’s AI Center of Excellence initiative, the center brings government, industry and academia together to support local AI development and talent training.

The facility is powered by NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform and GPU Merdeka, Indosat’s sovereign GPU-as-a-service platform. Researchers and students at UGM will gain access to enterprise-grade accelerated computing, AI software, open source and pretrained models, development frameworks, technical mentorship and NVIDIA Nemotron open models.

Early projects target healthcare, agriculture and natural disaster response. One effort, eNose-TB, aims to screen for tuberculosis by analyzing breath samples, supporting faster and more affordable detection in remote clinics and villages as Indonesia records over 1 million new tuberculosis cases every year. SmartAgri applies multimodal AI, satellite imagery, sensor data, local farming knowledge and edge computing to precision agriculture, a sector that employs nearly 30% of Indonesia’s workforce. Tech4Disaster is building a geospatial AI platform to process satellite and sensor data for earlier warnings and faster emergency coordination.