Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison has signed another deal to expand its partnership with Google Cloud, this time to provide what it claims is the first sovereign and edge cloud services in Indonesia supporting AI development.
Under the deal announced on Friday, Indosat Group plans to offer Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) to organizations in Indonesia that want to run AI and data-intensive workloads at their location of choice. Customers will be able to access core features of Google Cloud’s enterprise AI platform Vertex AI, as well as pre-trained ML models for speech-to-text, translation, and optical character recognition with support for over 100 languages including Bahasa.
Enterprises can also access Google Cloud hardware and software resources that enable AI to be deployed in an air-gapped environment or at the edge, including Google Kubernetes Engine, NvidiaTensor Core GPUs, the portable AlloyDB Omni database engine, and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics.
More crucially, says Indosat, its GDC offering will also help Indonesian organizations in the public sector and critical industries (such as defense, healthcare, financial services, utilities and manufacturing) accelerate digital transformation with AI and analytics capabilities while ensuring they have complete control and protection of their sensitive data.
Indosat Group will offer hosting options for GDC on-premises through its data center arms, which it says will ensure that data remains under the customer's control and within Indonesia's borders.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says that GDC adheres to all legal and sovereignty frameworks in Indonesia, including the Personal Data Protection Law and Government Regulation No. 71, which governs data localization requirements.
"Indonesia's public sector and regulated industries require solutions that meet strict data sovereignty and regulatory requirements,” he said in a statement. “Our partnership with Indosat Group will introduce next-generation, local sovereign cloud and edge cloud solutions to empower public sector and regulated organizations to accelerate digital transformation on their own terms.”
Indosat and Google Cloud have partnered on various offerings since 2021. Two months ago, they expanded that partnership to develop AI solutions for enterprises and consumers using Google Cloud’s unified AI stack.