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In May 2024, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) officially launched the Indonesia Digital Test House (IDTH)—a national facility aimed at strengthening the country’s digital sovereignty through independent testing of ICT hardware.

The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) has officially opened access to the 6 GHz frequency band, enabling the use of Wi‑Fi 6E and Wi‑Fi 7 in Indonesia. This move reflects the government’s serious intent to accelerate national digital transformation by upgrading high-speed connectivity infrastructure. However, is Indonesia’s digital ecosystem ready to embrace it?

We’ve seen thousands of employees leaving the troubled financial technology (fintech) companies like Investree, TaniFund, and KoinP2P. Thousands more are on the verge of losing jobs in this segment. Interestingly, those in the conventional financial sector have also quietly dismissed thousands of workers.

So, Edi Slamet Irianto, a former tax expert on President Prabowo Subianto’s 2024 campaign team, has reportedly accused finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati of standing in the way of the plan to establish the so-called State Revenue Agency (BPN), which would spin off the tax office and the customs and excise office from finance ministry. 

Two politicians from President Prabowo’s Gerindra Party have earlier been appointed chairman and president director of Pertamina, a state-owned oil and gas company under sovereign wealth Danantara. That’s not enough. Recently, one long-time ‘volunteer’ of Prabowo and one member of his economic team have been added to the board of directors and commissioners.

With 70 billion parameters, Sahabat AI is now comparable in size to Meta’s LLaMA 2 70B, one of the most widely adopted open-source LLMs. Yet, model size alone does not guarantee quality or ethical application. What matters more is performance in real-world use cases, transparency in development, and robustness in local context.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkiye, has just thanked President Prabowo Subianto for Indonesia’s decision to purchase 48 Kaan fighter jets worth US$10 billion produced by Turkish Aerospace, which will be delivered in 10 years time. It comes as a surprise because public have never been informed about the government’s plan on such a big procurement.

Salim Group, one of the largest business groups in Indonesia, is one of few secured approval to export ‘clean energy’ to Singapore through a joint venture with Medco Group (where Salim is also a substantial shareholder). At the same time, the group embarks on a major expansion of its coal-fired power plants in Batam, off south of Singapore.

Indonesia appears eager not to miss the global artificial intelligence (AI) wave. Through the Sahabat AI initiative, developed in collaboration with GoTo and Indosat and backed by the government, the country has introduced an ambitious project: building a domestic large language model (LLM) as a symbol of digital sovereignty.

Shares of GOTO Gojek Tokopedia (GOTO) surged 8.2% to Rp66 on Tuesday (Jun 10) on speculations about possible investment by sovereign wealth fund Danantara ahead of a planned acquisition by Grab. Is it one of eight (lucky number of President Prabowo) priorities set by the sovereign wealth fund?