Freedom Holding Corp. to Build $2B Sovereign AI Hub in Kazakhstan Powered by NVIDIA
Freedom Holding Corp. (FRHC) signed an agreement with Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development to develop a $2 billion Sovereign AI Hub. The facility will run on sovereign, exascale-class NVIDIA AI infrastructure and is aimed at speeding up AI capabilities across Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
The Ministry will create favorable conditions for hosting and operating large-scale AI systems and will lead talent development programs. Freedom Holding Corp. will operate the hub and serve as the principal financing and implementation partner.
Why this matters for engineers and builders
- Exascale-class NVIDIA stack signals capacity for large foundation model training, domain-specific LLMs, and high-throughput inference at national scale.
- Data residency and sovereignty: expect clear paths for compliant training on local datasets and sector-specific workloads (finance, public services, energy, logistics).
- Opportunity surface: MLOps roles, GPU systems engineering, distributed training, L4/L7 networking, observability, and applied research across multilingual models.
Infrastructure snapshot
- Planned site with 100 MW of available power-enough headroom for dense GPU clusters, liquid or hybrid cooling, and high-availability design.
- Operatorship by Freedom Holding Corp.; policy and talent programs led by the Ministry to seed an engineering pipeline and local vendor ecosystem.
- Stack assumptions: NVIDIA AI platform for training/inference, enterprise SDKs, and orchestration layers suitable for multi-tenant projects and secure workloads. For context, see NVIDIA's AI supercomputing approach here.
What to build first
- Sector-tuned LLMs and instruct models (Kazakh, Russian, English) with retrieval pipelines and eval harnesses tied to regulatory requirements.
- Vision and speech systems for public services (ID verification, document processing, call centers, accessibility).
- High-volume recommender and risk engines for finance, with strict audit trails and policy-based data access.
- Inference-optimized microservices with autoscaling across GPU pools; use token-level cost and latency budgets as core SLOs.
Build and deployment notes
- MLOps: model registries, lineage, red-teaming, and policy checks in CI/CD. Expect sovereign data controls and reproducible training.
- Networking: design for east-west bandwidth, NUMA-aware placement, and traffic isolation across tenants and projects.
- Observability: token/step-level telemetry, GPU contention alerts, and cost allocation by project and team.
- Security: confidential computing options where available, strict secrets management, and granular IAM consistent with national standards.
Leadership statements
Zhaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, said the initiative is a key step in implementing Kazakhstan's AI strategy-building a sovereign ecosystem to strengthen the economy, improve competitiveness, and create new opportunities across the region.
Timur Turlov, CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., said the company is committed to helping elevate Kazakhstan's position globally, combining its execution with NVIDIA technologies and the Ministry's vision to set a durable base for AI innovation and long-term regional growth.
Hiring, skills, and ecosystem
- Expect demand for GPU cluster ops, distributed training experts, data governance leads, and multilingual NLP engineers.
- Universities and private programs will likely align with Ministry-led initiatives for practical, job-ready skills.
- If your team needs to upskill for LLMs, MLOps, or AI infra, see curated paths by job role here.
About Freedom Holding Corp.
Freedom Holding Corp. provides financial services in 21 countries, including Kazakhstan, the United States, Cyprus, Poland, Spain, Uzbekistan, and Armenia. The Company's principal executive office is located in New York City.
In Kazakhstan, Freedom is building a financial and digital ecosystem that includes Freedom Bank, Freedom Broker, the insurance companies Freedom Life and Freedom Insurance, and a lifestyle segment with Arbuz.kz, Freedom Ticketon, and Aviata.
Freedom Holding Corp. shares trade on NASDAQ, the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE), and the Astana International Exchange (AIX) under the ticker FRHC. The company is regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and is a member of the Russell 3000 Index.
Contact
Head of Public Relations: Natalia Kharlashina
Freedom Holding Corp.
prglobal@ffin.kz
+77013641454
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