Japan and Indonesia’s AI journey goes into high speed with NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s technology has been enabling businesses in Japan and Indonesia to accelerate their AI journey with a stronger foundation and AI infrastructure.

NVIDIA continues its dominance in AI development in Asia Pacific by accelerating the AI journey for both Japan and Indonesia. While NVIDIA has slowed down its operations in China, its presence across other countries in the region continues to grow steadily.

Following announcements in India last month, NVIDIA now shifts its focus to East Asia with Japan recording new partnerships with the tech giant. The tech giant recently announced that Japanese cloud service providers SoftBank Corp., GMO Internet Group, Highreso, KDDI, Rutilea and SAKURA internet are building AI infrastructure with NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and software to accelerate transformation across the nation’s robotics, automotive, healthcare and telecom industries.

Supported by the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) program, the cloud providers are operating their AI data centers across the country’s central, northern and western regions to support development with national and regional NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure.

According to Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Japan’s companies stand to benefit tremendously from the new industrial revolution powered by AI. Huang also mentioned that by working with NVIDIA, Japan’s cloud providers are building the AI factories essential to reinvent the country’s automotive, robotics, telecommunications and healthcare industries for the age of AI.

“Company employees will supercharge their speed and productivity by automating work with AI agents. Industrial companies of tomorrow will operate dual factories — new AI factories to produce software intelligence for the products and machines their factories make today,” said Huang.

NVIDIA empowering Japan’s AI ecosystem

Looking specifically at how Japan cloud companies are working with NVIDIA, SoftBank Corp has adopted the NVIDIA Blackwell platforms to build Japan’s most powerful AI supercomputers, including the world’s first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with NVIDIA DGX B200 systems.

Using NVIDIA AI infrastructure, SoftBank Corp will be able to accelerate a broad range of industries, including its subsidiary SB Intuitions, which is using NVIDIA AI for the research and development of high-performance Japanese-native large language models (LLMs).

Meanwhile, GMO Internet Group is launching its GMO GPU Cloud. This will be the first local cloud offering in Japan featuring full-stack NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet platform for AI, NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. Built on Dell PowerEdge servers, the service is expected to come online this month to provide cloud-based AI computing for businesses in Japan.

Another Japanese cloud company, Highreso, is accelerating AI development in Japan with the establishment of Highreso Kagawa, a dedicated AI data center powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. The AI data center is built with NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, and is expected to begin operations next month, providing high-performance infrastructure for Highreso’s GPUSOROBAN AI Supercomputer Cloud service.

Apart from these three companies, KDDI is launching AI computing infrastructure built with NVIDIA HGX systems to support generative AI and specialized LLM development in collaboration with its ELYZA business group. KDDI is also planning a liquid-cooled data center that is expected to feature the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform with NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips.

Other companies include Rutilea, which is aiming to double the NVIDIA Hopper computing available in its AI cloud data center and is providing more than 1,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs for LLM development by customers building foundation models. SAKURA internet is also leveraging NVIDIA to expand its Koukaryoku cloud services for generative AI from 2,000 to nearly 4,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.

From Japan to Indonesia

Moving south from Japan, NVIDIA is also growing is presence in Indonesia. Huang was in Indonesia as technology leaders in the country launched an initiative to bring sovereign AI to the nation’s more than 277 million Indonesian speakers.

Called Sahabat AI, the program is a collection of open-source Indonesian LLMs that local industries, government agencies, universities and research centers can use to create generative AI applications. The models will be built with NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA NIM microservices.

A locally built LLM, Sahabat-AI models understand local contexts and enable people to build generative AI services and applications in Bahasa Indonesian and various local languages. The models form the foundation of a collaborative effort to empower Indonesia through a locally developed, open-source LLM ecosystem.

“Sahabat-AI is not just a technological achievement; it embodies Indonesia’s vision for a future where digital sovereignty and inclusivity go hand in hand. By creating an AI model that speaks our language and reflects our culture, we’re empowering every Indonesian to harness advanced technology’s potential. This initiative is a crucial step toward democratizing AI as a tool for growth, innovation and empowerment across our diverse society,” said Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) President Director and CEO Vikram Sinha.

NVIDIA Cloud Partner program creating opportunities in Indonesia

As one of Indonesia’s largest telecom and internet companies, IOH also launched “GPU Merdeka by Lintasarta,” an NVIDIA-accelerated sovereign AI cloud that operates at a BDx Indonesia AI data center powered by renewable energy.

This program was successful thanks to the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) program. NCP provided Lintasarta with access to NVIDIA reference architectures, including blueprints for building high-performance, scalable and secure data centers. The program also offers technological and go-to-market support, access to the latest NVIDIA AI software and accelerated computing platforms, and opportunities to collaborate with NVIDIA’s extensive ecosystem of industry partners, which include global systems integrators like Accenture and Tech Mahindra.

As such, by partnering Accenture, IOH is also developing applications for industry-specific use cases based on its new AI cloud, Sahabat-AI and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. The collaboration taps into the Accenture AI Refinery platform to help Indonesian enterprises build AI solutions tailored for financial services, energy and other industries, while delivering sovereign data governance.

Apart from Accenture, India-based global systems integrator Tech Mahindra also played a role in the development of Sahabat-AI. For example, Sahabat-AI enables IOH’s AI chatbot to answer queries in the Indonesian language for various citizen and resident services. The chatbot integrates with a broader citizen services platform Tech Mahindra and IOH are developing as part of the Indonesian government’s sovereign AI initiative.

Healthcare AI company Hippocratic AI is among the first to tap into Sahabat-AI to develop digital agents that can have humanlike conversations, exhibit empathic qualities, and build rapport and trust with patients across Indonesia. The capabilities include digital AI agent implementation that can significantly increase staff productivity by offloading time-consuming tasks, allowing human nurses and medical professionals to focus on critical duties to increase healthcare accessibility and quality of service.

Another company leveraging Sahabat AI is GoTo. As one of Indonesia’s leading on-demand transport services, as well as a leading payment application in the country, GoTo is adopting and enhancing the new Sahabat-AI models to integrate with its AI voice assistant, called Dira. Dira is a speech and generative AI-powered digital assistant that helps customers book rides, order food deliveries, transfer money, pay bills and more.