Microsoft plans to invest US$1.7b in Indonesia

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Microsoft has said that it will invest US$1.7 billion in Indonesia to help build up the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. This is the tech giant’s biggest investment in its 29-year history in the country. The spending will take place over four years. CEO Satya Nadella made the announcement after meeting Indonesian President Joko Widodo during his tour of Southeast Asia. Chandni Vatvani reports from Jakarta.

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42 COMMENTS

  2. Electricity is a major cost factor in running a cloud service or AI training center. The main electricity suppliers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are state-owned, which keeps electricity prices low in these countries. Congratulations to Microsoft for using cheap state-subsided electricity in developing countries to power your global infrastructure. The cost of electricity in California is three times that of these countries.

    A large Language Model (LLM) consumes significant electricity for each training run. Training runs for large models like GPT-3 could take weeks or even months on powerful hardware clusters with distributed computing capabilities. The US is banning the export of high-end efficient AI chips to China. With cheap energy, there is no need to use the more expensive and more efficient AI chips. As LLMs become bigger, they require more electricity to train. The Microsoft OpenAI LLM is proprietary and closed source.

    Don't be surprised when one of these countries announced a plan to build a 1.4GW coal-fired power station for US$1.5 billion.

    AI will bring 14% GDP growth in healthcare, education, and energy, bringing opportunities to everybody in these countries. In the meanwhile, US citizens are enjoying these benefits: Economic inequality, inflation, stagnant real wages for the last fifty years, costly healthcare, an expensive education system, student loan debt totaling $1.7 trillion with an average balance of $38,000, poor public transportation systems, racial inequality, mass incarceration, the militarization of police, deteriorating infrastructure, housing affordability, homelessness, the opioid epidemic, and gun violence.

  7. Sounds like Indonesia is inviting the beast into the nest. Microsoft has back doors for US intelligence services. If it holds your whole country’s data then you are literally conquered.

  12. Microsoft investing smaller here than M'sia, and some time ago Apple only build Apple Academies (and not production facility) in Indonesia. Big companies looking at Indonesia but still very much thinking twice to invest. Harsh truth, as Indonesian, I feel they look upon us only bc of market size and cheap resource.

  13. Electricity is a major cost factor in running a cloud service or AI training center. The main electricity suppliers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are state-owned, which keeps electricity prices low in these countries. Congratulations to Microsoft for using cheap state-subsided electricity in developing countries to power your global infrastructure. The cost of electricity in California is three times that of these countries.

    A large Language Model (LLM) consumes significant electricity for each training run. Training runs for large models like GPT-3 could take weeks or even months on powerful hardware clusters with distributed computing capabilities. The US is banning the export of high-end efficient AI chips to China. With cheap energy, there is no need to use the more expensive and more efficient AI chips. As LLMs become bigger, they require more electricity to train. The Microsoft OpenAI LLM is proprietary and closed source.

    Don't be surprised when one of these countries announced a plan to build a 1.4GW coal-fired power station for US$1.5 billion.

    AI will bring 14% GDP growth in healthcare, education, and energy, bringing opportunities to everybody in these countries. In the meanwhile, US citizens are enjoying these benefits: Economic inequality, inflation, stagnant real wages for the last fifty years, costly healthcare, an expensive education system, student loan debt totaling $1.7 trillion with an average balance of $38,000, poor public transportation systems, racial inequality, mass incarceration, the militarization of police, deteriorating infrastructure, housing affordability, homelessness, the opioid epidemic, and gun violence.

  24. I don't believe Microsoft will invest in Indonesia and this is because Microsoft already 3 time retract their promise to invest.

    And this is the 4th time

  26. must be investment of cloud (Azure, Office 365) infrastructure in Indonesia. It is an uncharted territory, and a possible GCC (Government Cloud Commercial) implementation to grow the business, as well as growing the Microsoft ecosystem there.

  32. Terrible decision, businesses the world over should learn from the mistakes of Mc Donalds, Starbucks, Zara and many other great companies and brands that blindly rushed into the country, invested billions and opened outlets in Indonesia and Malaysia during the go go days of free market capitalism in the early 2000s, who are presently under siege by brainwashed consumers in Indonesia and Malaysia over the gaza war.
    When considering foreign markets to expand into, companies must consider political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors and weigh its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats before deciding to invest.
    In the case of Indonesia, investing any amount of money after seeing what a well organised theocracy hostile to western capital can do to a company's bottom line is foolish and smacks of wilful ignorance. Why would you invest money in a country where the people will use what you built as leverage to make demands on you that are outside of your scope of business and risk your whole company going out of business?
    They will expose themselves to the literal blackmail demands that have been imposed on western businesses over a foreign conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with them and they will certainly come to regret it. The world should boycott Indonesia and Malaysia, see how long they can continue to operate their shams of being developed economies when no one invests in their pyramid schemes.
    On a side note, Microsoft investing in malaysia and indonesia when singapore is right beside them should bring their leader's business acumen into question, why invest in these countries when there is a better option (singapore) available where we will not blackmail you and make you go out of business, but instead give you a good opportunity to make money?

  39. 2 hours later, Microsoft lay off another 10,000 software engineers. Why not invest here at home, so headlines can be "Microsoft to hire another 10,000 engineer upcoming months, here at home"

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