Indonesia is hoping to convince Elon Musk to build data centers for his AI startup xAI in the Southeast Asian country.
Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, chairman of Indonesia’s National Economic Council, said he plans to meet the Tesla billionaire next year after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.
Musk previously turned down an invitation to build a battery factory for Tesla in Indonesia, but has worked with Luhut, an advisor to new Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto, in the past.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Luhut said he had pitched the idea of xAI opening data centers in Indonesia when Musk visited Bali in May to launch his Starlink satellite Internet service in Indonesia.
Describing Musk as a “friend,” Luhut said the battery factory idea bit the dust because Tesla “had their own idea that they’re going to do it in the US,” but that he is hopeful his data center proposal will be more successful.
Indonesia is a fast-growing data center market, and earlier this year Microsoft announced a $1.7 billion investment in digital infrastructure in the country to open a new cloud region.
Other cloud companies operating, or planning to operate, in Indonesia include Huawei, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, and AWS. Also in April, Indosat revealed it had partnered with Nvidia for a $200m AI center in Indonesia.
Whether xAI will join this list of companies remains to be seen. The startup is best known for building the Grok AI chatbot and runs a massive supercomputer from its data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which the company is hoping to scale up to one million GPUs.
