The Wall Street Journal reports that Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, a government advisor and chair of Indonesia’s National Economic Council plans on meeting Musk at President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January to pitch him the idea of bringing xAI to the country.
Having already built a mammoth supercomputing cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, Luhut will try and convince Musk to expand the startup’s footprint to South East Asia given the billionaire’s keenness to expand xAI’s training efforts to directly compete with OpenAI.
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Having purchased nickel from Indonesia for Tesla in a $5 billion deal in 2022, Indonesia is reportedly eying bringing xAI to the country to add to the country’s growing digital infrastructure.
Having secured a US$1.7 billion commitment from Microsoft to build new cloud and AI infrastructure in the country back in April, Luhut is now seeking to court Musk with the pair having previously worked with him and the recently elected Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto
Luhut has long touted Musk, previously claiming the billionaire CEO was considering setting up SpaceX launch pads in the country. In May, the local English language paper Jakarta Globe reported that Luhut claimed Musk and xAI were looking to collaborate with Indonesia AI startup Eureka AI.
Despite labelling Musk a “friend,” xAI’s founder rejected an invitation from Tesla to open a battery factory for electric vehicles in the country.
Musk also appears to be focused on building out xAI’s Colossus cluster in Memphis to become the world’s most powerful supercomputing cluster by doubling its current capacity of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs — with suggestions the startup could soon amass one million GPUs, according to claims by local lawmakers.
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