Kazakhstan Expands Compute for Its AI Future

NVIDIA says founder and CEO Jensen Huang's October 23 visit to Astana coincided with new commitments to expand Kazakhstan's AI computing capacity. Huang met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who awarded him the Order of Dostyk, First Class, and held a public conversation at the Alem.AI center with Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, who also serves as minister of AI and digital development.

The largest project comes from Firebird, which signed an investment agreement with the government and, according to NVIDIA, has secured a U.S. export license for 45,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs. Its first phase is being built with Kazakhtelecom at Data Center Valley, with commercial launch targeted for the third quarter of 2027. A planned second phase could bring total capacity to about 500 megawatts. Firebird also plans a local lab offering startups and researchers funding and compute. Kazakhtelecom has already installed 400 H200 and 480 B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty, and plans more than 1,000 GPUs at Data Center Valley next year, plus over 1,000 Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region.

NVIDIA also announced an investment in Kazakhstan-founded generative media startup Higgsfield AI, which is adding Vera Rubin capacity through cloud providers. Separately, inDrive and Pony.ai will study offering robotaxis in Astana.

At the event, Madiyev stressed Kazakh-language models, while Huang argued the country could convert its energy resources into AI and "export intelligence." The announcements matter as a test of whether a mid-sized, energy-rich nation can build sovereign AI capacity, though NVIDIA, which sells the hardware, is the source of these details.