President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has announced that the Indonesian government will create a new, simple regulation to help Microsoft build a data center in the country.

As reported on the Jakarta Post, this will happen “within a week” of the meeting between the Indonesian president and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that took place in Jakarta last Thursday.

“Microsoft would like to immediately invest in Indonesia, so we will decide within a week to issue a simple regulation to support investment in a data center,” Jokowi was quoted as saying.

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Data centers in Indonesia

It wasn’t immediately clear what barriers that Microsoft faced in constructing its own data center in Indonesia. Direct foreign investment is encouraged by the Indonesian government, though multinational data center operators might work with local partners for their know-how, or to mitigate risk.

For instance, Temasek-backed Hyperscaler SpaceDC last year announced additional details for a pair of data centers being built at Jakarta Barat. For its part, Equinix opted to collaborate with PT DCI Indonesia – JK3 was just announced, while Princeton Digital Group entered the market by acquiring a majority stake in XL Axiata’s Indonesian data centers.

To move faster, cloud giants such as Alibaba Cloud is understood to have established its cloud platform in existing data centers in Indonesia. Even the upcoming Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Indonesia will be based in non-Google data centers, as the cloud giant seeks to fast track the growth of its cloud platform in the Asia Pacific.

Jokowi also pledged that the government would continue improving Internet network across the country, pointing to the completion of the Palapa Ring as evidence of how the country’s telecommunication network is being improved.

As we reported earlier, the Palapa Ring Project is an ambitious initiative to install a high-speed network with 12,000 kilometers of fiber cable, to serve as the national backbone and overcome the challenges of Indonesia’s dispersed geographical layout.

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