A government is weighing an investment tied to Nvidia to sharply expand its data center capacity, according to a report published by The Jakarta Post.
The senior economy minister estimates the project could cost up to $720 million in total. The goal is to lift capacity from 580 megawatts at present to a targeted 1.3 gigawatts — more than double today's figure.
That price tag works out to roughly $1 million per megawatt of new capacity, based on the minister's estimates as reported by The Jakarta Post. The report indicates the minister offered these figures as projections rather than final numbers.
Data centers are the physical backbone of modern computing — large buildings full of servers that run everything from cloud services to the artificial intelligence tools that have driven a global surge in demand. Their capacity is often measured in the electrical power they can draw, which is why megawatts and gigawatts are used as the yardstick here. More power means more computing, and AI workloads in particular are hungry for it.
Nvidia sits at the center of that boom. The company designs the specialized chips that train and run most advanced AI systems, and access to them has become a strategic priority for governments and companies alike.
The source does not specify the exact structure of the potential Nvidia involvement, the timeline for the expansion, or when a final decision would be made.
Why it matters: securing more data center capacity — and the Nvidia hardware that typically powers it — is increasingly seen as essential to competing in the AI era, and a $720 million commitment signals how seriously governments are treating that race.