JAKARTA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Indonesia's

telecommunication company Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison

and its biggest tech company GoTo Gojek Tokopedia

launched on Thursday the development of Sahabat-AI, a large

language model ecosystem in Indonesian languages.

Sahabat-AI would enable Indonesians to build artificial

intelligence-based services and applications in Bahasa Indonesia

and various other local languages, with the understanding of

local context, the companies said in a joint statement.

It is supported by AI Singapore and India's Tech Mahindra

, which used Nvidia AI Enterprise software

including Nvidia NeMo to train the model and enhance its general

language understanding, according to the statement. Several

universities and media groups will contribute to optimise it for

local context and cultural relevance, it added.

The Sahabat-AI model, trained using Nvidia's ( NVDA ) full-stack AI

platform, would launch with 8-billion and 9-billion parameter

large language models in its first phase.

Indonesia's AI industry has attracted burgeoning interest,

with companies such as Microsoft ( MSFT ) pledging to build data

centres there.