Indonesia's own AI sits on foreign models and foreign chips

Sahabat-AI, Indonesia's home-grown language model, is being built by Indosat, GoTo and AI Singapore. The Indonesian part of the work is the language: data, adaptation, testing and the applications on top, covering Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese and Sundanese. Underneath, the system runs on foreign foundation models and NVIDIA hardware. Zenobia Chan of Georgetown University, writing for Fulcrum, calls this a mixed stack. A stack is the set of layers in an AI system, from the chips at the bottom to the app on your phone at the top, and a mixed one takes pieces from more than one country.

Chan does not treat mixing as a mistake. Neighbours do the same: Singapore's SEA-LION and MERaLiON are built on models from Meta, Google and Alibaba, Thailand's Typhoon on Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen. Her warning is about a quieter problem. "Mixed does not mean portable," she writes. Systems get tangled in proprietary data formats, cloud credits, security tools, fine-tuning routines and staff habits, so pulling one layer out later is expensive and disruptive. Variety on paper can also hide concentration in practice: three different models may all sit on the same cloud, or run on the same chip design.

Then there is politics. Chan notes that recent US pressure on its AI partners could narrow the freedom to pick and mix, through export controls, procurement rules, security requirements, or conditions attached to investment. Her test for a government is not who owns the technology. It is whether the models, infrastructure, data and tools can be replaced within an acceptable time and budget, and whether the state is still politically free to make that swap.

Why it matters

This gets real if Sahabat-AI ends up inside public services, banks and the apps people use every day, because then the question of who can switch it off stops being technical. The practical thing to watch is contracts: whether Indonesian agencies and companies are buying with exit terms, so their data can leave in a usable form, or signing up in a way that makes the next supplier the same as this one.