NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said today that Kazakhstan is “going to be a hub, a computing hub, an AI factory hub for all of Europe.” The centrepiece of the country’s plans is Data Center Valley (DC Valley), an AI computing cluster under construction in Ekibastuz, north-east Kazakhstan.
Huang was speaking at a fireside chat with Zhaslan Madiyev, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development. The session closed the country’s AI Month programme at the alem.ai International Center for Artificial Intelligence in Astana. It was Huang’s first visit to Kazakhstan. Touring the alem.ai centre earlier in the day, Huang said: “Kazakhstan is the first country I’ve visited where the President declared AI development a national priority.”
From AI tools to an AI economy
Much of the conversation was about AI as economic infrastructure rather than a set of apps. Huang argued that a country should not export its data and then import AI built on it from somewhere else. In his view, national AI infrastructure will sit alongside power grids, telecoms networks and the internet, with foreign technology complementing it rather than replacing it.
Kazakhstan wants to apply that logic to the wider region. The stated goal is to turn Central Eurasia from a buyer of foreign technology into a place that builds its own AI and sells it on global markets, backed by computing power, engineering talent and local tech companies.
Freedom’s stake in Kazakhstan’s AI build-out
Freedom Holding Corp. (Nasdaq: FRHC), the parent company of Freedom24, is also investing in AI infrastructure in Kazakhstan. In November 2025 it signed an agreement with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development to develop a $2 billion Sovereign AI Hub powered by NVIDIA infrastructure, on a site with 100 MW of available power. Freedom is the principal financing and implementation partner.
During the visit, Timur Turlov, CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., met Huang at the alem.ai centre and introduced Freedom: an international technology ecosystem spanning banking, brokerage, insurance and telecoms, along with lifestyle services from ticketing and travel to e-commerce and food delivery.
The two sides discussed a joint project to build AI infrastructure in Kazakhstan. In Astana, Freedom is building Akashi, a Tier IV data centre campus with capacity of up to 100 MW. Turlov said the holding would shortly complete its order for its first cluster based on the NVIDIA B300, which is due to launch in 2027 as a public GPU cloud for businesses and developers.
At the end of the meeting, Turlov stressed that Kazakhstan now has a large pool of talent that has already created a number of technologies in e-commerce and finance. Combined with the country’s own AI infrastructure, he said, this is becoming one of Kazakhstan’s main advantages in the global digital transformation.
DC Valley: compute for export
DC Valley is being developed by national operator Kazakhtelecom, with NVIDIA and US-based AI cloud company Firebird as technology partners. The first 50 MW facility is due in June 2027, and the site is designed to scale in phases to as much as 1 GW. Capacity for the first 215 MW phase is already fully reserved.
In June, Kazakhstan signed agreements worth up to $10 billion with NVIDIA and Firebird linked to the project. Kazakhtelecom plans to install more than 1,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region next year. NVIDIA listed its Kazakhstan announcements among its “NVIDIA in Europe” news from GTC Berlin this week.
Physical AI and people
Physical AI ran through the whole visit: robotics, autonomous systems and AI in manufacturing, energy and transport. Kazakhstan’s industrial base gives it plenty of places to put these technologies to work. One early example: ride-hailing company inDrive and Pony.ai are exploring a robotaxi service with Astana as the first city, built on NVIDIA’s autonomous driving platform.
The other theme was people: training AI engineers, growing startups and connecting local founders with global markets. On the day of the visit, NVIDIA joined an extension of Higgsfield’s Series B round. Higgsfield is an AI video platform co-founded by Kazakh engineer Yerzat Dulat, and its Almaty office is a resident of the Astana Hub tech park.
