INDONESIA—January 27, 2022—NVIDIA today signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (Kemendikbudristek) to develop artificial intelligence (AI) talent as part of the country’s digital transformation initiative.
Under the agreement, NVIDIA will help educate Indonesian lecturers and more than 20,000 university students in AI skills to boost the nation’s AI talent pool over the next five years. The MoA also covers AI curriculum development, translation research workshop and talks, and AI startup ecosystem development and support. In addition, NVIDIA DGX A100 systems will provide the computing needed to advance AI education in Indonesia.
“AI is transforming industries around the world, creating an urgent need for education that prepares nations and their citizens to contribute to the growing AI economy,” said Keith Strier, vice president of worldwide AI initiatives at NVIDIA. “Working with Kemendikbudristek and Indonesian universities, we will help the nation provide its students with the opportunity to learn using NVIDIA’s advanced AI software and systems.”
Kemendikbudristek was formed following the merger of the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Research and Technology in April 2021.
“We are committed to improving the quality of human resources in universities to drive digital transformation in Indonesia. This aligns with President Joko Widodo’s instruction to prepare millions of digitally talented people in Indonesia in response to digital transformation,” said Professor Nizam, Acting Director General, Directorate General of Higher Education, Research, and Technology, Kemendikbudristek.
Indonesia estimates that it needs 90 million skilled technology professionals by 2035, underscoring the urgent need to equip university graduates with AI competencies and skills.
Powering AI education and research
Kemendikbudristek recently opened the DIKTI AI Centre to support education, training, student projects and lecturer research. The NVIDIA DGX A100 systems being installed there will form the heart of the centre.
Powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, the systems will form one of the largest DGX A100 clusters in Indonesia. The initial installation will provide an estimated aggregate computational power of 25 petaFLOPS, which can be used to power a variety of AI and data science workloads. The systems will also be used to support AI projects by the research and development ecosystem in Indonesia.
”In the era of AI, big data and data analytics, one of the keywords is data flooding. The flood of data can only be processed to get good and correct information through a supercomputer in the field of AI. We thank NVIDIA and believe this collaboration will be an important milestone to realise the AI ecosystem in Indonesia,” said Professor Nizam.
As part of the MoA, NVIDIA will help Indonesia’s digital transformation by empowering the universities through the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and teaching kits, engaging with developers on industry translational projects, conducting partner workshops on NVIDIA AI software stacks, hosting boot camps, and supporting startups in joining the NVIDIA Inception programme.