Maximising the Opportunity.
Indonesia stands out with one of the highest long-term potentials for AI in the region. But in order to take full advantage of this opportunity, Indonesia must tackle the potential challenges the new technology creates; it will need to do more to overcome the digital divide, building basic digital literacy as well as advanced IT skills, and continue to build out connectivity and infrastructure to close any remaining gaps.
Indonesia has some of the greatest long-term potential from AI – but it is still at the beginning of its journey.
Taking a look at Indonesia’s journey to maximise its AI opportunities, we learned three key things:
Indonesia is optimistic about AI.
In our comparative estimates, Indonesia stood out for how optimistic its population was to try different use cases. 62% of Indonesians were optimistic about the impact of AI on them personally, compared to just 13% who were pessimistic. This is the second highest across the whole Asia-Pacific region.
The infrastructure gaps have been improving, but will continue to need focus.
Access to compute, energy resilience and connectivity have all improved significantly in recent years. However, continued rapid rises in demand and the need to close remaining rural-urban gaps will require continued investment.
More work is needed to put in place a supportive policy environment.
Compared to other countries at a similar level, the wider policy framework for AI is less developed in Indonesia. Leaning into a pro-innovation regulatory framework, and improving dataset availability will therefore be important next steps.
Summary by pillar.
Overall Economic Potential.
Advanced.
In the long term, Indonesia has one of the highest relative levels of economic potential from the use of AI.
Adoption and Interest.
Advanced.
Indonesia is already seeing high levels of usage of today’s tools, and the population as a whole expressed significant optimism about its future.
Infrastructure.
Developing.
While there has been significant progress in increasing connectivity, data centres and energy supply in recent years, more investment will be needed to support future demand. At the same time, the country has a relatively low level of higher risk R&D investment in AI.
Skills.
Early.
Indonesia will need both significantly more advanced AI skills and improve the digital literacy of the general population.
Policy Ecosystem.
Early.
While Indonesia has an ambitious national strategy for AI and a growing AI policy ecosystem, it is still at a relatively early stage in its development.
To ensure people have access to AI tools, more work is needed to overcome Indonesia’s digital divide.
In order for Indonesians to be able to take full advantage of AI tools, they need to be able to access them wherever they are and have the confidence to explore them fully.
That will require overcoming the current digital divide, driven by:
Connectivity.
While Internet penetration has grown rapidly in recent years, there remain around 80 million Indonesians without access to the Internet.6
Urban-rural divide.
Indonesia’s challenging geography – with many remote islands and mountainous regions – makes infrastructure deployment difficult. Nearly half of all villages in Indonesia (approximately 48%) still lack a basic cellular base transceiver station (BTS) needed for Internet access.7
Digital literacy.
To take full advantage of AI, Indonesia will need more advanced AI skills.
One recent World Bank study suggested that the country will need an additional 9 million digitally skilled workers by 2030. Without these workers, companies will struggle to implement new workflows needed to fully take advantage of the potential from AI.
Giving the wider population greater digital confidence is important too.
Much of the benefit from using AI tools doesn’t require advanced digital skills, and around half of the potential economic benefit from AI tools can come from simply adopting current tools without wider business reorganisation.9 In our polling:
of workers said they wanted to better understand how AI models worked
would like to know more practical use cases of how to use AI
how they can best prompt AI models to get the most of them
To support increased computing needs, Indonesia will need greater investment in data centres and energy.
Over the last decade, the amount of computing power needed to train AI models has increased by a factor of 4 year-on-year, while the total cost to train them has more than doubled.10
In Indonesia, there are already over 90 data centres11, with the market size expected to roughly double over the next five years.12 To support this growth and stay on track with the country’s renewable energy targets, significantly more investment is likely to be needed in the country’s supply of clean energy.
At the same time, continued investment will depend on maintaining supportive regulations that enable secure cross-border data flows while upholding the data protection principles outlined in the PDP Law.
Google Cloud
supports economic transformation.
2025 marks the fifth anniversary of Google Cloud opening a region in Jakarta to help serve customers across Southeast Asia. By bringing its cloud computing technology closer to customers in the region, the new region helped businesses who needed access to lower latency applications or to store or process data locally for compliance or regulatory reasons. In total, we estimate Google’s products and services supported at least Rp 88 trillion (US$ 5.4 billion) for businesses in economic activity in Indonesia in 2024.
Rp 900 trillion
(US$55 billion) in economic value has been added to Indonesia by the Google Cloud region from 2020 to 2025, supporting an average of 92,000 jobs per year.
Rp 220 billion
(US$14 million) in costs for on-premises hardware, software, and licensing costs have been avoided every year by the average Indonesian large enterprise, by migrating their core systems to Google Cloud.
In the next five years, the impact of Google Cloud will continue to scale across Indonesia.
Rp 1,400 trillion
(US$88 billion) in economic value will be added to Indonesia by the Google Cloud region over the next five years, supporting an average of 240,000 jobs per year.
Rp 310 trillion
(US$19 billion) is expected to be gained by Indonesian businesses through export activities enabled by Google Cloud to overseas markets in the next five years.