Milan (AsiaNews) – On 23 October, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, made his first-ever visit to Kazakhstan. In Astana, he met with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at the Akorda Presidential Palace and took part in a public discussion with Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, who serves as Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, at the international centre Alem.ai.
During his stay, Huang said that the country was a potential computing hub, encouraging Kazakh authorities to turn its energy resources into exportable computing capacity. This would help diversify an economy that remains heavily dependent on hydrocarbons and raw materials.
The Data Center Valley project
The visit coincided with the signing of an investment agreement between Kazakh authorities and Firebird, a US firm specialising in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The company has secured a US export licence for 45,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs, processors designed for parallel data processing, to be used in the first phase of the Data Center Valley hub in Ekibastuz.
The project is being developed in partnership with Kazakhtelecom, the country’s leading telecommunications operator, with commercial operations slated to begin in the third quarter of 2027.
In June, the Kazakh government announced a series of deals with Firebird and Nvidia, with an estimated value of US$ 10 billion, aimed at developing a cluster powered by 100,000 GPUs.
The hub’s total capacity could reach 1 GW, and the government estimates that, once fully operational, it will generate at least US$ 3 billion in annual revenue from the export of processed data.
Coal as a resource
The choice of Ekibastuz is no coincidence. Located in the Pavlodar region, one of Kazakhstan’s primary coal basins, the city sits next to the GRES-1 thermal power plant, one of the largest coal-fired facilities in the region.
The existing industrial infrastructure, the availability of energy, and a cold climate, which helps lower server cooling costs, make the area well suited for hosting large-scale computing centres.
The government wants to transform the country’s energy resources into digital services for international markets.
For an economy still heavily reliant on the export of hydrocarbons and raw materials, artificial intelligence offers a path towards diversification. However, the sector requires levels of electricity that the national grid is already struggling to provide.
In 2025, the Central Asian country produced 123.1 billion kWh against a consumption of 124.6 billion kWh, resulting in a deficit of approximately 1.5 billion kWh.
Thermal power plants accounted for 74.4 per cent of local production, reflecting a system still deeply dependent on coal.
The government intends to eliminate this deficit by the first quarter of 2027 through the commissioning of new production capacity. But achieving this goal will be challenging, given rising electricity demand and the need to modernise existing infrastructure.
A major new consumer
Indeed, the projected scale of the Data Center Valley makes the road ahead exceptionally challenging.
If the site were to use 1 GW on a continuous basis, its annual consumption would be approximately 8.8 billion kWh, an amount that, according to a theoretical estimate, would be equivalent to about 7 per cent of the electricity consumed in all of Kazakhstan in 2025.
