Regional Leaders Discuss AI-Ready Digital Infrastructure

models or talent, how we can ensure that it works in a federated manner. I think I’ll just, I was discussing and maybe I’ll just focus on one piece, which is on AI -ready data, if I can focus on that and leave it for the esteemed panelists on the large number of issues. Some of the elements that we are focusing on include, one is on how to make it more discoverable. That would be a very basic point to ensure that it’s discoverable. Second is how to ensure that the data sets are trustworthy, and that would be the second element. The third would be on the interoperability, and the fourth would be on the usability across systems.

So on discoverability. On discoverability, the metadata of that structure is extremely important, so that would help to, that’s a first. element of having a metadata structure which is understandable and well defined and can be used across the second on the trustworthy part would be the quality assessment so we’ve developed as kind of a quality assessment framework which focuses on the quality of the data so that to ensure credibility on the data interoperability a lock would depend on whether data can talk to each other what is the unique identifiers that we have which will ensure that the different data sets whether are they talking about the same thing or different we are able to identify that and the fourth would be on the usability across systems would be based on the standards and classifications that we have whether it’s a common definitions and common standards so that two sets of data don’t refer to the same thing and I suppose this really forms the bedrock of making a data AI ready and that That’s something that we’re working with ministries and governments and state governments across the country.

And given the importance of data sets in the AI infrastructure, it has an important part to play. The other aspect on data is also on its dissemination and access, on how we are able to ensure that data sets in themselves have value beyond AI and what kind of dissemination and mechanisms can be there which will make it usable for people to leverage them for business while preserving the privacy aspects of individual data. One other thing, since we are talking about and the panel will be having discussions on AI infrastructure, I just wanted to focus on one thing that I think discussed, over the past couple of days. has also come up that the existing models seem to be extremely data infrastructure, infrastructure heavy, whether compute infrastructure, data infrastructure.

And every time a new query is put out to the model, is it necessary for the billions of bytes to be again run through again and the gigawatts of power that we need? And are there alternative mechanisms available? And I just want to highlight yesterday one comment which stays with me, is what Vishal Sikka had made, that when we talk in terms of AI infrastructure, we talk in terms of gigawatts of power. Compared to that, a human being requires 2 ,000 calories, which is only 100 watts. So are we missing something out there in the infrastructure? And perhaps a greater focus on the models going forward is there. So I’ll stop here. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Secretary. And I’m now going to join the fireside chat here. The discussion that we have planned will cover various different aspects of digital infrastructure. So when you hear digital infrastructure, you might be first thinking of the data centers and the compute. But we actually want to have a conversation that also encompasses the solution side, the skill side, so that we really look at the whole spectrum of infrastructure, even standards. So these three S were introduced yesterday by ITU’s head, the three S of solutions, standards, and skills. Kind of a nice way to open up to the panel. We have different perspectives here today. And we’re going to try to stick to time.

But let me introduce you to this panel by asking the first question. And I would request that each of the panelists then quickly states their name and their institution to shorten the time. What we would like to hear from each of you is that from your vantage point, what do you see as the most critical gap, the most exciting opportunity for the global south in generating positive impact through AI? So we’ve asked each of them to think about a concern or opportunity and then also to maybe link it to strategy or vision. So maybe I’ll first go to the lady on my right from the WTO. May I request you for your perspective on the big challenge or opportunity?

Thank you so much to the Asian Development Bank for the invitation and the organization to this interesting conversation. My name is Johanna Hill. And I… I am with the World Trade Organization. And let me start out with the opportunity side of the equation. We really are seeing that AI and trade, when they work together, can offer important opportunities for developing countries and low -income economies. Our projections at the Secretariat have led us to believe that by the year 2040, trade could grow by almost 40%. So that would be the 40 by 40 effect. But then here come the caveats, right? For that to happen, for those opportunities to really be realized, one element that is really important is the digital infrastructure, the skills that you mentioned, and policy readiness.

You know, we’ve heard throughout this conference and before the important opportunities and applications in different sectors, in agriculture, health care, new services being developed as we speak, new services and goods that are becoming more AI -related, more tradable, and we are also seeing that that can have important opportunities. for the smaller firms in developing economies and in the big economies also. We did a survey with the ICC that we published last year on the opportunities for businesses and for small and medium enterprises. And of those respondents, many of them were saying that they’re already using AI, of course, from bigger companies, more developed economies. But even the smaller firms are also seeing opportunities in areas like market intelligence.

So we do see that it can be a game changer.

Fantastic. And one of the things that I’ve been hearing a lot at this summit is that specifically the SMEs, the technology has moved so fast that there’s a huge adoption gap and understanding of how they can actually integrate the AI into their business models, into their little shop that takes a picture of a product and uploads it quickly. AI can be super helpful in this but hasn’t yet reached that audience. Maybe I’ll turn it over to you. Maybe I’ll turn to the other side and request our colleague from Uzbekistan to share his perspective.

Thanks for the question. Thanks for having me here. Let me talk about the gaps which exist in our country. I think the first one is unequal access to compute capacities and I think advanced AI digital skills. So in that sense, these foundations play a crucial role because if you don’t bridge those gaps, many countries, nations will be just the consumers of AI rather than creators of AI value. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. First one is developing human skills. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. First one is developing human skills. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas.

So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. So in that sense, Uzbekistan is advancing strategic ideas. all stratus of our nation, starting from students, professionals, and public servants. So we are not concentrating on the tech sector, but also we try to cover all the spheres of our nation.

And secondly, we are developing our infrastructure. For that reason, our government is allocating around 200 million USD. So to create our own government data center with supercomputers, GPUs, acquiring from NVIDIA. And also we are working with DataVault, a Saudi Arabian company, to create an energy -efficient data center, which is based on renewable energy. It is a very big project. It’s around 5 billion USD. And the data center will be… put into operation within two, three years. hopefully and also we are trying to develop our government strategy we adopted a strategy 2030 last year and this by by the year to 2030 we’re trying to get there early reach the export of AI related products by five 1 .5 billion USD so

fantastic so either by coincidence or planning you touched on the 3s the solutions the skills and the standards the policies fantastic thank you so a very comprehensive view with multi -pronged strategy that you didn’t introduce yourself so I just say you with the Ministry of Digital Technology and an institution quite focus the center of the development of AI and the digital economy Fantastic. Okay, let me turn back to this side. So from Indonesia, we have someone who’s actually in this skills domain. Would you like to share with us what you, from your vantage point, perceive as the key opportunity or challenge?

All right, thank you. Hi, everyone. I am Professor Hamam Riza. I am the co -chair of the National AI Roadmap Indonesia 2030. And also I am the president of the Collaborative Research and Industrial Innovation in Artificial Intelligence, the organization that was founded in 2020 when we launched our first national AI strategy towards Indonesia 2045. That is the vision. And I think AI will take us there, really. So from my vantage point, I think… We are… we have no we need to move beyond numbers even though we understood that AI economy will create millions of jobs and also potential economy of up to 1 trillion so from my vantage point from the Indonesian perspective global south they are basically triple deficit in terms of what we are going to it is the most challenging one the first one is that certainly about the data and infrastructures, the compute infrastructures we are still lacking the connectivity the networks but as I have marked down here in order for us to smooth up all the AI use cases for public services for health services, for agriculture, and many other things, you need to basically solve this triple deficit.

And that is also regarding how you need to develop the AI talents. There is a significant lack and scarcity of high -quality localized data centers tailored to Indonesia, as well as shortage of AI skilled talents that limits the capacity of long -term innovations capabilities. So our government is addressing these gaps through the national roadmap that I co -chaired. And our primary concern is how the digital divide and how the AI divide, which is the digital divide. Which is created by this. generatively I didn’t think I towards many of the public sectors in Indonesia in an in general in the global self that we can tackle so that while there is nine to two percent of our skill knowledge worker but we are still using you know a very basic AI tools and needs to be aware of all the and all the risks you know applied to the output of this AI tools so those those things are that I think will be my point of view towards closing the gaps for the global south and especially for Indonesia

thank you so much and it’s of course one of the most populous countries in Southeast Asia It’s a very young workforce. 270 million. Yes, and startup buzz in Indonesia is also palpable, so lots of potential in Indonesia. Last but not least, I want to go to our Asian Development Bank Country Director for India. Mio, can I request you to share your views?

Thank you. From ADB’s perspective, of course, foundation is important. We need to have a power supply, stable power supply, and the devices that people have access to, and reliable broadband, even in our office. So that’s a foundation. But we are in India. Do we expect India to put so much money on foundation to have a ground -level impact? But India has a scale. So what we need to focus is, as others already said, is a service. So we work on agriculture sector, water supply, and even irrigation sector where AI is widely applied. Because of the scale of the people that we have in the global south, while we work on the foundational infrastructure, at the same time we really have to work on how AI can be applied at the service level.

And this is where ADB would like to support. Thanks.

Thank you, Mio. So we have, as you can see, different perspectives at the same space of how do we get at grappling with this massive development opportunity that AI represents. For this first round of questions after the opening, let’s go into the foundations a little bit. I want to go to Uzbekistan again. And you already mentioned you have… ambitions on infrastructure, policy and skills. Now, how do you actually balance this in terms of priority setting? Can you go for all of them all at once? How do you finance it? Does this keep you up at night, how you balance these three different strategic objectives?

It’s a tough question because we are a developing nation and money is always a scarce element for us. So anyway, our government is trying to allocate enough resources so we can cover all the aspects of AI development to create the AI ecosystem. First one, as I already mentioned, it’s a strategy. 2030, which sets our priorities, which is human -centered AI. And secondly, with the government trying to allocate enough resources overall now the government announced about 300 million USD for development of AI and the money goes to first of all implementing projects in the government sector in the social sphere healthcare, education, transportation cyber security and etc and also government is trying to provide necessary infrastructure building data centers acquiring GPUs and also we are now creating a data lake which will be collecting the data of the government sector so SMEs, startups and other who wants the data they can use those data for free or for some money usually free and anyway we’re trying to work with other countries as I already said that we are we have a good project five million AI leaders so United Arab Emirates they helping us to helped us to build this program and it was launched now over 1 million people already registered and go to training certifications there so also we are trying to attract foreign foreign investments and now government announced very good in tax incentives and other incentives to for example if you are want to invest in a you know in Uzbekistan and try want to build a data center which costs over 100 million USD you will get very cheap and take the intensive and customs exams and etc so going trying to balance with cautiously but still providing necessary conditions for the to build a ecosystem

very impressive and since I had the opportunity to chat with somebody else from Uzbekistan this week I also know that in your KPI as a public servant AI roll it out has entered that KPI space so that’s always going to make a difference let’s go back to Indonesia now I’m gonna you know of course skills is your comfort zone but can I ask you about the infrastructure side I know that the hyperscalers the big cloud companies international companies have invested significantly in Indonesia now how do you see that now moving into the AI age and is that a big step forward for you? is there a lot of activity on additional infrastructure build out what do you see happening in that

yes so I see these questions and I’m really eager to answer this because suddenly our infrastructure is undergoing a transformation really to meet the demands of the AI demand and certainly with the ability of many of these new infrastructures coming out of the government and also from the business I think benchmarking with many other countries including you know in the regional ASEAN take for example the presence of the global hyperscaler in the country have established actually multiple cloud regions in Indonesia. But certainly this needs to be amplified because as you know 10 years in many other technologies, one year in AI, right? That’s what they are saying. So how do you can fulfill this demand of AI compute massive data for training because you need to build up our own for example large language model that can align with our cultures.

So those hyperscalers needs to move beyond just being a single a host for this you know many of the AI models from outside of the country right so and the infrastructure readiness is also being federated by our chief toward the sovereign AI we are now preparing the presidential regulation actually to push forward the innovations the investment and we need to collaborate with many of the hyperscalers and we are ensuring that the physical infrastructures like the GPU data center and localized edge computing yeah is going to be present in the country. And one thing that the Vice Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs mentioned to me yesterday that we are struggling building up the ecosystem. That means there will be special economic zone for these hyperscalers and new data centers being brought forward in order to align and be part of our national AI roadmap, AI journey in Indonesia.

And we are going to prepare ourselves in this AI transformation so that our data… digital consumer… is going to be part of our transformation. The technology is accessible for all. Even, you know, what we are right now, you know, participating in the India AI Summit says about democratizing AI for all. So I think that is a very significant theme that is also part of our national AI roadmap. Thank you.

Fascinating. And, again, I think you as a large economy, you have that opportunity similar to how India is also portraying it this week of really wanting to develop your own, you know, language models and really playing in that league. However, there are many countries. also countries we work with who don’t have that kind of scale and who need to look at it quite differently. So the different nuanced strategy that you mentioned of investing into the big AI, the small AI, the edge AI, all these different pieces, very interesting. With this dynamic, can I turn to WTO? How do you see trade competitiveness evolve? That’s really your space where you are at. What are those interesting approaches that are emerging which could help support maybe the cross -border collaboration while you also, of course, respect data sovereignty?

Countries will need to collaborate, right? There’s not enough money to go around for everybody to play in that top league. So trade competitiveness, what do you see there?

So I was talking about the opportunities of trade growing by the use of AI. Okay. And if you think about… That growth comes from the lowering of trade costs. It comes from powering AI -enabled goods and services crossing borders. And it’s… Also, new products and services that are going to be invented are being invented by AI. And when you talk to business, when we asked through the survey, some of the constraints that they are having and doubts in the use of AI have to do with competing regulations and having a high cost in trying to comply. And fragmentation is actually an area of data, for example, that can become a problem. And so we developed and published last year in the World Trade Report what the Secretariat calls the AI Trade Policy Openness Index to help regions measure how they’re doing in that space.

And in there, you can see, for example, that some of the lower income economies can seem quite open in that space. But it might be because of the lack of regulation. And when you talk about AI, I think what a lot of countries and customers are saying is that AI is not a good thing. What customers are looking for is, you know, it’s AI. that is responsible, you know, trading AI with trust. So just not having regulation can also be a disadvantage to your competitiveness. So starting to look at those things that way. And then in the part of the solution side, definitely the regional approaches are important, those collaborations, and sharing infrastructure, for example.

When you don’t have those economies of scale, those huge investments come in your way. And then not every single company or every single country is looking to be on the edge of things necessarily, but we do want to adopt AI to boost our economy and our competitiveness.

Well, thank you so much. And I don’t know whether people heard about this new initiative that the working group on the democratization of AI, of compute, has come up with. ADB is actually supporting that. Really, this is… This has not yet evolved, right? This collaboration on the infrastructure. How do you share that properly across borders? It’s still new territory and very interesting to see. Can I turn to my colleague, Mio, and request her to talk a little bit about the engagement that we’ve had with member countries. What does demand to ADB actually look like in this space?

try to invest in the township planning and the implementation. Also, we can have a water supply road project that can be connected to the industrial parks so that private sector can invest in the digital -related facilities. So mobilization of private capital is one. And the second is it’s an application across sectors. We just don’t look at the single sector project. As I said, we can work on road and water at the same time. And while we work on the Agri -AI project, we work with the building capacity of that institution as well so that they can handle the AI. And the third is the knowledge. As I said, we support quite a bit of this master planning or the strategy development at the municipality or the state or even at the regional level.

We see India. And you’ve been coding on science. India. And of course we always bring in the international experts so that India can learn and also this is a good opportunity for India to expand their capacity to outside countries. Thank you.

Thanks, Miyu. I actually had a follow -up question for you that would have touched on this de -risking and catalyzing investment topic. Maybe I’ll let you ask you to repeat that now, but let me just add our digital sector office being fairly new. They are getting a lot of demand for guess what? Data centers. And, you know, we welcome that. We have conversations with government but I’m truly impressed with the conversations at the summit here. Earlier this morning I attended one where the state of Telangana was sharing what they’re thinking about and they’re really quite cognizant of the kids to school not many kids fit into a Ferrari milk doesn’t make sense so we need to look at what type of compute is needed for what and I think we in ADB are also learning more and more how to engage in these conversations properly we’re learning alongside everybody else in this room probably and that’s an important distinction to make because it will influence the financing bit how much do we need, what do we actually need and when and how do we make that investment sustainable just wanted to add that it’s an insight from this morning that I couldn’t not retail.

Let me go back to Indonesia and ask you about cutting -edge skills because you’re in that space. I found it very interesting that you’re actually, you said co -president or co -chairing this platform where you bring together private sector, education sector, government. And as you are looking at that, how is your organization doing it in practice? How do you bring these people together and get them into action mode? How do you do that?

Okay, thank you. Very important question here, I think. So I would like to say in three pillars that what we are doing, especially that we chair the AI ecosystem in Indonesia where the government, the industry are involved in the AI ecosystem. Within an academia as well as the… civil society as well as media we call this pentahelix platform we discuss about I think three pillars first one is the talent certainly second one is infrastructures and the third one is how basically we can articulate use cases towards all the services public services and businesses as well so Indonesia for talent we have set our target quite ambitious that we want to have at least 12 million talent by 2030 and for us this is something that are uh fairly challenging, considering that we are still lacking around 3 to 5 million talent as of now, right?

So what we are trying to achieve together with the whole ecosystem is to establish an academy, the Korika Academy, where we promote to not only upskilling and reskilling some of the civil servants and other workers, but we are also looking at how we can train the trainers. We work with several of our friends. I will note here that Elevate Indonesia, for example, part of the… Microsoft and many others big tech that are there works together with our ministry to establish this program for Thailand

and it’s a digital academy or is it a physical?

it’s a digital academy with the LMS learning management system and many other things we also established the Kodika chat actually it’s a chatbot for this training and upskilling program that we do with the government beyond Thailand basically we are aggressively looking at how we can nurture this talent to work in data centers, in many others startups and incubators as well as to establish some of the most diverse demanding use cases So the third one is we try to work on climate health nexus in establishing how we counter and predict the climate sensitive infectious disease such as malaria and dengue. And we have established for the past three years the Climate Smart Indonesia which have attracted many of the universities as well as NASA pollution and air quality programs to look into these use cases.

So we can basically reach out to many of the areas where the… …the health, the disaster prone area because Indonesia is a supermarket for disaster. You can have the hydromelectorological disaster, you can have ecological, you can have many things. So you need to…

I’m not buying any of them.

Of course, we don’t want to be shopping.

So really amazing this focus also on the use cases, right? And prioritizing those that match with your country needs. Yes, thank you. Give the highest impact, right? Super. I’ll turn back to Uzbekistan and just wanted to ask you to elaborate a little bit in terms of private sector capital mobilization. You have all these ambitions you shared across the board really in terms of infra, in terms of skills and so on and so forth. Uzbekistan as an economy has still… a good chunk of traditional economy but also has a very active startup sector that I’m learning more and more about how dynamic people are around the region, Central West Asia going and finding scalable solutions but these are the still growing companies for mobilizing capital for your infra you’re going to need the big ones or you’re not going to need the international partners or what are you thinking about this private capital mobilization, what’s your strategy there?

First of all I should mention that according to the documents adopted by year 2030 we are planning to attract around 1 billion USD for investments for creating AI related digital infrastructure and part of this goes to creating data centers and we’re going to need to And also we’re working with our Chinese partners also. It’s the biggest IT company, Huawei. So they’re also involved in creating AI ecosystem in Uzbekistan. Mainly, first one is upskilling public servants to help them to adopt AI adoption and also creating the necessary training programs for the specialists and also creating the AI infrastructure like data centers, data lakes. And also we need to get, we are transferring to 5 .5G and also working on 6G also with Huawei.

So, yes. And also, as you mentioned already about startups, we are developing our own. startup ecosystem and we established many venture funds funds of funds and also there are many emerging private funds so they are now trying to invest in startups attracting private funds, private investments so currently we have allocated around 50 million USD for AI startups so they are already providing services both for public and for businesses so trying to balance and attract all the stakeholders of the ecosystem

Fantastic, so you’re mixing also your public funds that you invest for example in the fund of funds and then bringing in more investment domestically from your investors but also from abroad That’s amazing. And then having large industry partners that are interested in the market, bringing them in like Indonesia did with some of the hyperscalers. You are bringing in Huawei and Chinese partners. So basically it’s a mix of different strategies you mentioned. Also, that’s fascinating. Again, Uzbekistan being one of the larger countries in Central West Asia and Indonesia, both fairly large in their region. And then, of course, again, I want to come back to this point about diversity of country context. That’s both a challenge but also an opportunity.

I mean, for us at ADB, it adds, of course, complexity because we need to respond to these different needs. But from the perspective of WTO, is there like a specific area such as maybe interoperability standards or AI talent mobility? Or the shared data set? joint research, where do you see regional cooperation making the biggest difference? I

think that it’s a bit of a matter of context, right? At the regional level and at the national level. We’ve talked about the divide in the digital divide and how do we overcome that and the role of infrastructure and skills and the rest. And at the WTO Secretariat, we’ve been very concerned on this issue. And so we partnered with the World Bank and we did a study called Digital Trade in Africa, a general one, and then we did some country pilot studies to look at the situation. And we did see that some of the regional work, like the ACFDA and the digital protocol, really made a difference in how it helped bring them along and to set a certain standard in many of the countries that we studied.

Then we did a similar study with the World Bank in Latin America and the U .S. The Caribbean and the Inter -American Development Bank partnered with us. And we saw there that the situation was a bit different, more diversity in terms of regulation and trade policy, infrastructure needs. So there’s basically not one size fits all. But we have seen regional banks playing a very important role in helping countries that want to go in the regional way. I know ASEAN has done important work in AI policy, for example, and other regions are also working in that sense. And I do think that that brings economies of scale to a certain extent. It helps you resolve questions on electricity sometimes.

And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity and further work to be done at the regional level.

Thank you. And I think with the regional cooperation integration agenda being also top of mind for ADB, I just ask my colleague also to… tell me a little bit about her perspective. Of course, she represents ADB in a very large economy in South Asia, but we do have regional cooperation happening around the region. Mio, what do you see as opportunities with regards to regional cooperation integration on this digital infrastructure space?

Right, thank you. So again, ADB, we support India. I’m in India. Our office covers India. So we are here to support Vixie Bharat so that India can grow at the pace to become a developed country by 2047, and the AI is a necessary means to do that. But again, as everybody knows, we are the regional bank. Nobody around us should be left alone or left behind. So ADB, through this kind of forum, has to be a catalyst. A catalyst for the global south. So we are here. Of course, there are many countries who cannot invest in scale. What are the solutions? So we are here to support the solutions, and also we support big tigers like India to support those countries too.

That’s number one. And number two is the balance approach. When we talk about regional cooperation or the work in a small country, I was quite shocked about five years ago. I went to the small neighbor country here, and I was working in the agriculture sector, and I was proudly introducing, I want to introduce aquaculture using the AI -based fish feeding system. And my negotiation ended in three seconds because the government said, no, we are interested in employment. What are you talking about? What AI -based feeders will just reduce the people who are going to work there? So that is a big lesson learned for me. We need an ecosystem, but even we talk about AI, the solution may be elsewhere.

so as you introduced the skill is super important and since that understanding again going back to India we’ve invested more than like 5 billion in the skill including the PM set and working over 10 states and now AI based skill is the big part of it so we are always mindful that the regional cooperation and we should not forget should not leave any country to be left behind but solution again may not be as direct as we expect thank you

thank you Mio and we have one minute left on the clock that throws a spanner into my closing with the thought that AI may not be the solution for everything but I think it’s a fair ending looking for a name We need to understand the problems and see how AI, if it can be deployed, if it can make a difference, how it should be supported through skills development, infrastructure investments, regulation. So I want to thank my panel for a very interesting tour de force of this topic. Also thought I’d take the opportunity to thank the audience and India for hosting this amazing summit. As ADB, we’ve been proud to be a partner of it, and it’s been truly fascinating, and we’re quite proud to have been part of this journey.

Thank you all for attending, and thanks to the panel. Let’s give them a round of applause for sharing their views. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.