Kazakhstan commits $2B to sovereign AI: exascale NVIDIA infrastructure, 100 MW campus, and talent pipeline
Kazakhstan is moving fast on national-scale AI. The Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development and Freedom Holding Corp. announced a phased plan to deploy sovereign exascale NVIDIA AI infrastructure, build a Sovereign AI Hub, and stand up an AI Academy and Research Lab.
The project is scoped at $2 billion and will run on a 100 MW site inside Kazakhstan. Freedom Holding Corp. is set to be the principal financing and implementation partner, with the Ministry enabling favorable hosting, operations, and workforce development conditions.
What's being built
- Kazakhstani Sovereign AI Hub operated by Freedom Holding Corp., powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure.
- National-scale compute targeting exascale-class AI workloads.
- An AI Academy and Research Lab to train engineers and researchers.
- Policy and infrastructure support from the Ministry for deployment and operations.
Why this matters for engineers and teams
- Local, sovereign compute for sensitive data and regulated workloads.
- Capacity for large-scale pretraining and fine-tuning across Kazakh, Russian, and other regional languages.
- Faster iteration with in-region access to high-bandwidth training clusters and low-latency research collaboration.
- Rising demand for skills in distributed training, CUDA, scheduling (Slurm/Kubernetes), MLOps, and AI platform engineering.
Technical signals to watch
System specs weren't disclosed. Given the NVIDIA partnership, expect modern GPU clusters with high-speed interconnects, large-capacity storage, and advanced cooling to stay within a 100 MW envelope.
- Compute: multi-GPU training pods for LLMs, multimodal models, and high-throughput inference.
- Networking: low-latency intra-node links and high-bandwidth fabric for cross-node scaling.
- Storage: multi-petabyte object stores and parallel file systems for data pipelines and checkpoints.
- Ops: mature observability, quota/cost controls, and reliable scheduling to maximize utilization.
For reference architectures and platform guidance, see NVIDIA data center AI platforms.
Talent and ecosystem impact
The Academy and Research Lab signal a long-term bet on local skills. This creates paths for engineers to work on frontier-scale training, evaluation, and deployment without relocating.
Expect collaboration between universities, startups, and enterprises as the hub phases in. If you're building in AI, start aligning your skill stack now: distributed PyTorch (FSDP/DeepSpeed), CUDA tooling, NCCL, TensorRT-LLM, data curation, eval frameworks, and secure data engineering.
- Upskilling resource: browse role-based AI learning tracks at Complete AI Training - Courses by Job.
What officials said
Zhaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, said the NVIDIA collaboration is a key step in executing Kazakhstan's national AI strategy and building a sovereign ecosystem to boost the economy and regional opportunity.
Timur Turlov, CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., said the initiative will strengthen Kazakhstan's position in global AI by combining the company's execution with NVIDIA's technologies and the Ministry's support to create a strong base for innovation and long-term growth across Central Asia.
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