Nokia expanded its partnership with edge chip firm Blaize to galvanize hybrid AI inference infrastructure across Indonesia and the wider Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Working with Indonesian IT provider PT Datacomm Diangrah, the deal builds on an existing memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Nokia’s Singapore arm and the U.S. chip designer. That deal also aimed to power AI inference and infrastructure for the APAC market, with the new arrangement converting the MoU framework into “deployed, revenue-generating infrastructure” for Indonesian enterprises and public sector bodies.

The announcement pointed to Marketing-Interactive research claiming Indonesia's AI sector is expanding at a 31% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), the highest rate in Southeast Asia. Research from local operator Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (Indosat) also claimed the drive for sovereign AI will add up to $140 billion to the country's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030, equivalent to annual economic growth of up to 6.8%.

SDxCentral in an upcoming supplement will probe the sovereignty question on a global basis as telecom operators and cloud providers look to establish a foothold in sovereign AI ventures. Indonesia is no exception, with China’s Tencent Cloud, for example, backing public and hybrid cloud ventures from Jakarta-headquartered Telkomsel, as well as building AI tools for business-to-business (b2b) and business-to-consumer (b2c) use cases, bolstering the mobile operator’s lead in national AI. Consulting giant Accenture and Nvidia, meanwhile, are helping Indosat build the emerging economy’s first sovereign AI cloud.

Indonesia is noted by Nokia as the reference market for broader APAC expansion, providing the blueprint for adjacent markets including Vietnam, the Philippines, and the wider Southeast Asian region.

"This three-way collaboration represents exactly the kind of outcome-driven partnership the market needs right now," Dion Leung, head of AI and cloud in the region at Nokia, noted. "As the trusted global provider of advanced connectivity, Nokia's role is to make hybrid AI deployable at scale – connecting the cloud to the far edge with a level of reliability, security, and automation that enterprise customers can build real businesses on.”

Nokia touted its infrastructure backbone for graphic processing unit (GPU)-intensive radio access network (RAN) workloads as made up of training, AI-RAN acceleration, and large-scale cloud inference.

The Blaize proposition

Joseph Sulistyo, SVP of global marketing at Blaize, recently told SDxCentral the latest arrangement tied in with Nokia’s changing status in today’s network market, moving away from its previous position on the parameters into telecom and real-life AI use cases.

“[We are] building into what their vision, what their roadmap would want to be and also to have kind of a more added value than just as a networking provider or a part of telco ecosystems," Sulistyo said. "Basically moving really into the neocloud space, and the [colocation] data center providers are paying attention to it."

Blaize was established in 2010 by CEO Dinakar Munagala, CTO Satyaki Koneru, and Ke Yin, who collectively boast three decades of experience in Intel’s graphics division.

Originally operating under the name Thinci, the California-based company has secured more than $330 million in funding to date. Its edge computing platform is built around the 1600 system-on-chip (SoC) AI processor.

The firm expanded its APAC-heavy focus through a $50 million contract with Chinese hardware developer NeoTensr, focused on developing edge infrastructure in APAC.