Indosat CEO Vikram Sinha is building an AI for Indonesia’s local languages. Can he make a business case for sovereignty?

Is there room in the global AI race for anyone other than the United States and China? Vikram Sinha, the CEO of Indonesia’s second-largest mobile carrier, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH), thinks there has to be.

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“What gets solved in the U.S. or China might not work in Indonesia,” he told Fortune in early April, pointing to the country’s different culture and languages. That leaves the space open for companies like Indosat: “We’re in a pole position to see how we can deliver connectivity plus compute–or intelligence–to millions of people all over the world in a sovereign manner,” he continued.

Sovereign AI has become the buzzword of choice for just about every government concerned about leaving the AI space solely to U.S. and Chinese labs like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI.

Sinha is betting that the next phase of AI—running models near the end user, in local languages for local problems—will belong to telecom companies like Indosat in the so-called Global South. Indosat’s CEO, who came to Indonesia after working in India, the Seychelles, and Myanmar, is eager to drive that development through Sahabat AI, a platform for the country’s startups, underpinned by an Indonesian large language model that he argues will avoid the blind spots of a U.S.- or Chinese-trained model.

Still, even Sinha wondered whether he could turn “sovereignty” into a business. “If I ask my team whether they can make a business case for Sahabat? They don’t know how,” he admitted.

From India to Indonesia, via Yangon

Sinha, born in Jamshedpur in eastern India, joined the telecoms business in 2005 with a job at Bharti Airtel. Seven years later, the company dispatched him, at just 37 years old, to lead its business in the Seychelles, a tiny island nation of just 120,000 people off Africa’s eastern coast. He then moved to another island nation, leading Ooredoo’s business in the Maldives, then went on to Myanmar, right as the Southeast Asian country was in the midst of its (ultimately short-lived) democratization and opening.

What Sinha recalled from his time in Myanmar is the average age of his team: 27 years old, all “young guys,” in his words. Yet he felt his time in the country was a rewarding experience. “When I was going to Myanmar, people warned me about the competency gap,” he said. “But if you invest in getting the best out of people, you see a lot of talent.”

In 2021, Ooredoo tapped Sinha to lead the newly formed IOH, created from a merger between Indosat and Hutchison 3 Indonesia, owned by Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison. Ooredoo and CK Hutchison together own a 65.6% stake in IOH; the Indonesian government has a 9.6% stake, a holdover from Indosat’s previous time as a state-owned enterprise.

Most mergers disappoint, with the consulting firm McKinsey estimating that as many as 70% of such deals fail to live up to their promises. (Sinha puts the number even higher, claiming that 95% of telecoms mergers fail). Indosat, however, is an exception, with the company continuing to grow its revenue, profits and user base in its post-deal years.

“The number one guiding principle we wanted to follow was to look at the merger from a maximize, not optimize, outlook: How could we make one plus one equal 11?” Sinha explained. “When investors and analysts look at mergers, they only talk about synergies, but employees and customers don’t care about that. They care about growth and experience.”

Outperforming a down market

Indosat reported 56.5 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($3.3 billion) in revenue for 2025, a 1.1% increase over the prior year, while profits climbed 12.2% to 5.5 trillion rupiah ($320 million). But those numbers mask a tough year: Sinha notes that the company’s performance was weaker in the first half of the year, only for things to turn around in the second half.

That strong performance has continued into the first quarter of 2026, with revenue jumping by 12.1% year-on-year. (Indosat released its Q1 earnings on April 29, after Fortune‘s conversation with Sinha). Indosat also achieved its highest average revenue per user (ARPU) since the merger, at 45,000 rupiah ($2.59).

In his earnings briefing to analysts, Sinha highlighted Indosat’s new partnership with Google, offering the U.S. tech company’s Gemini AI product to its users. “We see a lot more opportunity on ARPU upside,” Sinha told analysts.

Still, Indosat’s shares are down by 9% for the year. That’s still better than the broader market, which is in a months-long slump over worries of a downgrade to “frontier market” status. (The Jakarta Composite Index is down by 17% since the beginning of the year)

Indonesia’s tech sector has been in a longer funk. Investors were once hot on the country’s potential to serve hundreds of millions of young, upwardly-mobile, digitally-savvy Indonesians. That optimism has since faded. “The problem is there were a lot of unicorn startups,” Sinha said. “They were chasing the wrong metrics. They were all on th