Indonesia's Future in Tech, from a STEM PhD Fellow Perspective (2026)

Is there still hope for Indonesia in technology sector?

I have been thinking about this more seriously after two pieces of news that stuck with me. Tokopedia, once one of the strongest symbols of Indonesian technology optimism, is now controlled by TikTok’s parent company after it acquired a controlling stake. Tech in Asia reported that TikTok confirmed layoffs in Indonesia after the Tokopedia deal [1]. On June 30, 2026, Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim was sentenced to 10 years in prison over the case about buying Chromebooks from his time as education minister [2]. He denies wrongdoing and plans to appeal. I do not claim to know the full legal truth of the case. Still, the news is difficult to separate from a broader question: can Indonesia create a stable environment for ambitious tech and research?

This essay is not an expert forecast on Indonesia’s economy or politics. It is a personal reflection from the perspective of an Indonesian graduate from the University of Indonesia who is now doing a PhD abroad in a STEM field. My concern is simple. Indonesia has the scale, market, and natural resources to matter, but those advantages are not enough. The more important question is whether the country can build institutions, firms, universities, and public systems that make high quality technical work possible at home.

Author Background

When I was an undergraduate, I was more nationalistic than I am now. I saw Malaysia and Singapore not only as neighbors, but also as competitors. I even avoided installing Grab because Gojek existed. I felt that using a foreign competitor was a small betrayal of an Indonesian company. I wanted Indonesian companies to win because I wanted Indonesia to be respected internationally.

Gojek and Tokopedia were the two big companies that symbolized hope when I was a computer science bachelor student. They suggested that Indonesia could build competing tech companies, solve local problems, and produce technology that Indonesians actually used every day. They made it easier to believe that talented Indonesians did not always need to leave the country in order to do meaningful work. Everything seemed possible to build in Indonesia with enough effort and ambition.

That nationalist belief has become harder to maintain. It did not disappear suddenly. Rather, it weakened as I learned more about Indonesian politics, history, and public institutions. After studying Indonesia’s history, I was not surprised to see Malaysia’s passport sit near the top of the global rankings while Indonesia’s ranks far lower, down in the 60s. A passport is a rough measure of how much the rest of the world trusts a country. Malaysia’s politics have been calmer and more predictable, and that trust shows up at every border its citizens cross. Indonesia has never been a politically peaceful country.

My perspective on Indonesia also changed after I moved abroad. I saw how people from other countries carry a mindset that quietly helps their nations succeed, and I started to notice what Indonesia was missing. Even so, I still want Indonesia to succeed. I still feel happy when the country receives good news. I just no longer have the same optimism or the same devotion.

The recent news brought that feeling back. It is not only about one company or one legal case. It shows the weakening of a story that many young Indonesians once wanted to believe. The story was simple: Indonesia was big enough, young enough, and had enough problems to solve that it could build its own tech giants. So, what went wrong?

Monas at night — Jakarta. Captured by Keyne Oei.

Jakarta skyline at night — Jakarta. Captured by Keyne Oei.

Background: Indonesia Economy and Growth

Indonesia should not be seen as a country in economic collapse. The World Bank’s Indonesia overview reports that growth in the first half of 2025 was 5 percent and projects annual growth of about 4.8 percent through 2027 [3]. It also reports that the official poverty rate was 8.5 percent in March 2025, lower than the previous year.

These numbers show that Indonesia still has stability, scale, and room to grow. However, economic growth does not guarantee that a country is learning to build more complex things. Indonesia’s population, resources, and young market only matter if they are converted into real research and engineering capacity. That capacity is what lets a country reach the frontier in a few domains instead of staying a market for everyone else’s products. Becoming a high income country is not only a matter of having more consumers. It is about being able to learn, build, and coordinate at a higher level. Without that, Indonesia Emas 2045 risks becoming a slogan rather than a plan.

Tech in Indonesia

The technology sector is where this tension becomes visible. Indonesia has the market, the users, and the local problems that local companies should be able to solve. For a while, Gojek and Tokopedia seemed to prove they could. They showed that Indonesian companies could build products used by millions of people. They also proved that local technology could answer local problems, not just import foreign services.

This is why Tokopedia’s position after the TikTok deal feels important. A foreign parent taking control is not automatically a national failure. Companies are acquired all the time. It is also worth being honest that these companies were never only symbols. They burned enormous amounts of cash, were not consistently profitable, and the market repriced them hard. Part of what happened to Tokopedia is an ordinary capital and business-model story. However, symbols matter in national development. When one of the strongest symbols of Indonesian digital ambition comes to be controlled from outside the country, the meaning of that hope changes. It shifts how people read the future of technology here.

The Nadiem case cuts the same way from a different angle. For many Indonesians, Nadiem represented the possibility that people from technology could enter public service and contribute differently. His conviction complicates that story. There are honestly two ways to read it. One is that a real conflict of interest was finally punished, which is accountability working as it should. The other is that a capable person was chilled for making hard technical calls in a difficult job. I do not know which reading is closer to the truth, and the honest answer probably holds some of both. But here is the uncomfortable part: even accountability, if it looks arbitrary or selective from the outside, sends the same signal to the next ambitious person deciding whether to serve. Public service loses its pull when talented people come to see it as personal risk rather than a place to contribute. And when a state cannot visibly separate corruption from honest mistakes and hard technical calls, it teaches them that doing nothing is the safest choice.

This is not only about companies and courts. It also affects how young Indonesians imagine success. When local technology companies lose their symbolic strength, foreign institutions begin to look more reliable. When public service looks risky, working abroad begins to look more rational. And much of it is rational. If the labs, the pay, and the stability are better abroad, then preferring foreign opportunities is not a character flaw. It is an accurate reading of where the opportunities are. Many people do not only leave because they dislike Indonesia. They leave because Indonesia has not given them a serious enough reason to stay. The longer this goes on, the more foreign success looks like the only kind worth having.

Indonesian Mentality as a Result of Weak Institutions

So much of what gets called a mentality problem is really an institutions problem in disguise. But a problem that begins in the institutions does not stay there. Over years, it settles into how people think, until the habit outlives the reason for it. That is how I read the inferiority complex some Indonesians have about their own ability. It is not that Indonesians lack talent. During my time at the University of Indonesia, I met many talented and hardworking people. It is that a long history of weak institutions has taught people to treat foreign validation as a higher form of success.

This appears often on social media. Foreign brands, foreign lifestyles, and foreign jobs are easily turned into status symbols. Working abroad can become a way to signal status in front of people in Indonesia, even when the work itself is not necessarily more meaningful. From my perspective, this has always felt strange. Chasing trends does not build anything that lasts. At some point, trying to lead in a small but meaningful area should be seen as more impressive than simply working for a foreign company.

I want to offer one illustration, with the caveat that it is a single anecdote and not necessarily evidence of how an entire country thinks. I remember a conflict between Indonesians and Koreans on Twitter. It started when an anonymous Korean account made racist remarks. Some Indonesians responded back by arguing that Koreans generally could not speak English better than Indonesians. I understood the anger and I am not defending the racist remark. However, the response still felt strange to me. Why has speaking English become such a status marker in Indonesia?

English is only a language. From my experience in Europe, people do not care too much about how impressive your English is. To them, English is just a language like any other language. For readers, would it not be strange if speaking Malay, Indonesian, or Thai became the basis for responding to an insult? Speaking any of these languages does not, by itself, give someone more value. The same is true in many East Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and China. For many people there, speaking English simply means learning another language. It is not the main measure of ability.

It is also worth asking why Indonesians would spend so much time and effort responding to an anonymous Korean account. Nobody even knew this person’s name.

However, this was part of the Indonesian mentality I grew up around. Anything foreign often became a symbol of success rather than simply something from another country. The real measure should be contribution. The more important question is whether someone can build something useful, compete in a difficult market, and improve the country. This is not meant to insult Indonesians. I think Indonesians are very talented. The problem is that the misplaced attention feeds itself. Weak institutions taught people to look outward, and a country looking outward stops giving its own institutions the attention and confidence they need to grow. The loop is the real reason this is so hard to build back from.

The Talent Problem in Tech

This misplaced attention becomes more serious when it enters the technology sector. Technology depends on people who are willing to build difficult things over a long period of time. If the strongest status signal is still foreign validation, then the best career path will often appear to be outside Indonesia. This is why the central issue, from my perspective, is talent. When Indonesians receive offers abroad, people often congratulate them, and this is understandable. Salaries are often higher, laboratories are often better equipped, and management is often more professional. For engineers, researchers, and students, leaving Indonesia can therefore be the rational choice. The problem is not that people leave, since I also left and cannot honestly criticize others for making the same decision. The problem is that Indonesia does not create enough strong reasons for talented people to stay or enough credible paths for them to return. Talent follows capital and opportunity, not the other way around. Indonesia spends very little on research and development. Public markets also have not rewarded long term technology bets. Retaining talent and attracting capital are really the same problem seen from two sides.

A strong technology ecosystem treats talent as a resource that must be retained, developed, and continuously renewed. Silicon Valley is a useful example because its strength is not based only on capital or market size. Its companies recruit globally, offer strong rewards, and create an environment where ambitious people can imagine doing meaningful work. Talent is therefore not treated as a passive input. It is actively competed for.

Indonesia has to approach talent with the same seriousness and aggressiveness. Patriotism alone is not a sufficient reason for talented Indonesians to stay. For a PhD graduate, returning should not require giving up serious research. For a talented engineer, working in Indonesia should not mean accepting weak systems and limited resources. For a founder, cooperating with the government should not mean entering a space where every difficult decision can later become a personal threat. If Indonesia wants to keep talent, staying has to be intellectually and professionally credible.

At this point, the reader (you) may ask why retaining talent matters so much in technology. The reason is that technology progress depends on accumulated skill. It is a long term investment in research and development. One strong engineer is useful, but a group of strong engineers working together for years can build systems, train younger people, and create institutions that last. This is why the question is not only whether a country can produce talent.

China vs India

The comparison between China and India is useful because it separates two issues that are often mixed together. One issue is whether a country can produce talented people. The other issue is whether it can absorb those people into work at home. Indonesia should not copy either country blindly, but both cases are useful for understanding the talent problem.

India has produced many excellent engineers, scientists, founders, and executives. Its diaspora is one of the strongest in the world, especially in STEM. However, diaspora success is not the same as domestic strength. If many of the best career paths still point outward, then the country benefits from reputation but loses part of the accumulated skill needed to build at home. MacroPolo’s Global AI Talent Tracker makes this visible in AI research. It reports that in 2019, nearly all top Indian AI researchers pursued opportunities abroad [4]. By 2022, the situation had improved, but only about one-fifth of top Indian AI researchers stayed to work in India [4]. That is real progress, but it still means that most of the strongest AI talent was working outside the country. India is not lacking proof of individual ability. It is lacking enough places at home where that ability can compound.

China shows a different pattern. It has built a much deeper domestic base for technical work. It has large engineering teams, strong factories, deep supplier networks, and companies that can absorb top talent. MacroPolo’s Global AI Talent Tracker reports that China produced 47 percent of the world’s top-tier AI researchers in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2019 [4]. The same report notes that China has expanded its domestic AI talent pool, while India remains a major exporter of top-tier AI researchers even though its retention has improved [4]. This domestic base matters because firms such as DeepSeek do not appear from talent alone. They require research talent, engineering teams, computing resources, capital, and long term company discipline to exist in the same ecosystem.

The consequence for India is not that it has failed to produce talent. It clearly has produced talent at a very high level. The stronger criticism is that India has often produced people whose most important technical work happens elsewhere first. This debate became controversial among Indian AI researchers after DeepSeek. When China produced DeepSeek, India had to ask why a country with so many excellent AI researchers still struggled to produce a domestic competitor with comparable global visibility. At that point, the issue is not the lack of talents. The issue is whether talent, resources, institutions, and long term investment can meet inside the country.

Lesson for Indonesia

This is why the Indian case matters for Indonesia. If the best people leave before local institutions become strong, the country may still produce impressive individuals. However, those individuals will often strengthen foreign laboratories, foreign companies, and foreign products first. This weakens the ability of domestic institutions to accumulate experience over time. It also makes it harder for local companies to move from service work and implementation toward original products, advanced research, and technical leadership. A country cannot build a complex technology base only by exporting its best people and celebrating them afterward.

The deeper goal for Indonesia should be to create enough serious and meaningful work at home so that talent can accumulate inside Indonesian institutions and companies. We cannot keep celebrating Indonesians for graduating from Harvard while treating local universities as secondary. We also cannot keep praising talent abroad while giving too little status, funding, and trust to the institutions that should develop talent at home. My view is that many of the same talented people could do more meaningful work in Indonesia if local universities, labs, and companies had stronger resources and higher standards. They should not have to leave Indonesia and work for foreign companies in order to feel that their skills are being appreciated. If the most ambitious work is always somewhere else, the best people will eventually go somewhere else.

Indonesia’s Future in Tech

Indonesia’s technology future should be judged by whether it can make important sectors more competitive.

Indonesia is not short of meaningful technical problems. The missing ingredient is often the aggressiveness to compete in how well those problems get solved. Technology is worth something when it makes a system cheaper to run, or faster, or safer, or more reliable. If a project cannot be measured against outcomes like those, it is branding, not progress.

This is where Indonesia has been too passive. Too many sectors are protected, bureaucratic, or comfortable with mediocre execution, and comfort kills the pressure to improve. Strong technology ecosystems do not allow that comfort. They compete hard for talent and capital, they copy what works, they improve it, and then they compete again. Indonesia needs more of that intensity.

Energy and materials are the clearest example. The country has nickel and real geothermal potential, alongside hard, unglamorous problems in mining, electricity, transport, and the environment. If nickel is going to anchor the national strategy, the ban on raw ore exports was only the first step. Indonesia now does the processing, but foreign firms own most of the smelters. Most of the output is still low value ferronickel for stainless steel. The harder ambition should be to compete further up the chain, in battery chemistry, in recycling, in the software and sensors that make a plant run efficiently. Otherwise Indonesia stays important to everyone else’s supply chain without ever becoming technologically strong.

The same logic applies to health, language, education, and public services. The target should be the places where better technical work would actually change daily life. What Indonesia needs is a higher standard, one that judges technology by whether it improves a real system and strengthens local industry.

Closing Thoughts

I am more pessimistic about Indonesia than I was as a student, but I am not hopeless. The scale, the youth, the problems worth solving are all still there. What is missing is the conditions that let talented people build at home without giving anything up to do it. I hope the politics and the institutions slowly become the kind people can trust, where building something feels safer than doing nothing. The future I want is one where leaving Indonesia is a choice, not the default for anyone who wants to do excellent work. The harder task, and the one that matters most, is to build the conditions that let excellent work happen at home.