Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to create sovereign and Edge cloud services in Indonesia.
Indosat will offer Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) on-premises to customers in Indonesia via its data center arm, which can be used for workloads including artificial intelligence (AI).
Customers will also have access to Google's Vertex AI platform, and pre-trained machine learning models.
The service is targeted at supporting the defense, healthcare, financial services, energy, and manufacturing sectors among others in their use of AI while maintaining complete control and protecting sensitive data.
Google Distributed Cloud comes in an air-gapped environment or can be deployed at the Edge/on-premises and includes Google Kubernetes Engine, NvidiaTensor Core GPUs, the portable AlloyDB Omni database engine, and Dataproc for running open-source data analytics.
"Indonesia's public sector and regulated industries require solutions that meet strict data sovereignty and regulatory requirements,” said CEO Thomas Kurian 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 Group CEO Vikram Sinha added: “Indonesia is paving the way towards its golden era in 2045. Indosat Group is committed to contributing through technological advancements in pursuit of this vision.
“The partnership with Google Cloud is driven by empowering Indonesia, aiming to deliver the country’s first sovereign cloud and Edge cloud solutions. These solutions will equip organizations with the state-of-the-art infrastructure, operational features, and developer tools they need to accelerate digitalization at scale.”
The two companies have had an ongoing relationship since 2021, adding AI solutions for enterprises via Google Cloud's unified AI stack in June 2024.
Google launched its air-gapped version of GDC in July 2024, which enables customers to use Google Cloud offerings when access to the Internet is not possible.
For example, a US Defense Department agency could use GDC for translating foreign documents with Google's language translation, speech-to-text, and optical character recognition software, while not connecting to Google Cloud.
The first version of Google's Distributed Cloud offering was announced in October 2021 and was described as a fully managed product the company said suits running local data processing, and low-latency Edge compute workloads that can be deployed on-premise. Customers of GDC include Gulf Edge, Orange, McDonald's, and Clarence - a JV between Proximus and LuxConnect.
In January of this year, it was announced that BDx would acquire Indosat's data center portfolio.
