Nokia and Indosat partner on 5G and AI-RAN rollout across Indonesia
Nokia and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) have announced a multi-year network modernisation partnership that will see Nokia deploy advanced Radio Access Network (RAN) technologies across Indosat's nationwide infrastructure in Indonesia. The agreement covers low-band 5G across the full network footprint and mid-band 5G to approximately 80% of the network over the next three and a half years, with NVIDIA involved as a third party on the AI-RAN architecture layer.
The deal goes beyond a conventional equipment refresh. Nokia will supply its Habrok and Pandion radio families alongside Levante basebands, Centralised RAN software and network management and automation platforms. AI-driven automation tools are included, targeting improved energy efficiency and operational cost reduction — areas under increasing scrutiny as energy prices weigh on operator margins globally.
AI-RAN: from MWC demo to field trial
The most technically significant element of the collaboration is the AI-RAN roadmap. Nokia, Indosat and NVIDIA completed the first AI-RAN call at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona earlier this year. Under this agreement, the three companies are targeting field trials of AI-RAN in Indonesia by the end of 2026, including new Nokia-developed AI algorithms designed to improve spectral efficiency on NVIDIA's AI-RAN platforms.
AI-RAN is an emerging architecture that co-locates AI compute workloads on RAN infrastructure, enabling inference to run close to the radio edge rather than routing traffic back to centralised cloud facilities. Indosat is framing this as an "AI Grid" — a unified layer that distributes both connectivity and AI capability across Indonesia's diverse and geographically dispersed population.
Justin Hotard, President and CEO of Nokia, said the partnership "reflects a broader shift in the industry, as operators invest in networks that deliver high performance at scale while supporting greater efficiency, new business models and digital growth."
Indosat's chief executive Vikram Sinha pointed to practical applications already in motion, including government services, healthcare, education and agriculture, supported by the AI-RAN Innovation Centre in Surabaya and NVIDIA's AI Technology Centre ecosystem.
Market context and competitive positioning
Indonesia is one of South-East Asia's largest and most complex mobile markets, with more than 270 million people spread across thousands of islands. Coverage economics are challenging, and mid-band 5G deployment — which carries higher capacity but shorter range than low-band — requires a dense site footprint. Indosat, formed from the 2022 merger of Indosat Ooredoo and Hutchison 3 Indonesia, holds one of the larger spectrum portfolios in the country and has been positioning itself as the AI-forward operator against rivals Telkomsel (backed by Telkom Indonesia) and XL Axiata.
Nokia's position in the deal is notable for the vendor landscape. Ericsson and Huawei remain significant RAN suppliers across South-East Asia; a multi-year Nokia win of this scale in Indonesia reinforces Nokia's efforts to grow its RAN market share in the Asia-Pacific region following several high-profile contract renewals in Europe and North America. The inclusion of NVIDIA as an AI-RAN partner also signals that GPU-accelerated RAN is moving from lab demonstration toward operator-grade field deployment faster than some analysts had projected.
Regulatory and standards context
Indonesia's communications regulator, Kominfo (now Komdigi following a 2023 restructure), has been actively pushing operators to accelerate 5G deployment as part of the government's broader digital economy agenda. The country's national AI strategy similarly targets AI infrastructure build-out across public services. This partnership aligns with both policy tracks and may attract co-investment or preferential spectrum treatment from the government, although no such terms were disclosed in the release.
From a standards perspective, AI-RAN remains an active workstream within 3GPP and the O-RAN Alliance. Field trials in a large, live network such as Indosat's would generate commercially relevant data on interference management, latency and energy consumption — findings that are likely to feed back into both bodies' standardisation processes.
Nokia and Indosat did not disclose the financial value of the contract, nor the total number of sites to be upgraded.