Kazakhstan just signed a $1.9 billion deal to build a data center, betting that it could become a center for AI in Central Asia. The country’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development signed an agreement with an international organization to start construction.
Kazakhstan came back earlier. The country became one of the world’s leading Bitcoin mining centers after China’s crackdown in 2021 pushed miners to the west. Cheap electricity and loose regulations made it attractive. Then the truth hit. The proliferation of mining operations, many of which were unregistered, created major problems for the Soviet-era power sector. A blackout followed. The government responded by cracking down on crypto miners, imposing new taxes, and shutting down illegal operations.
Global demand for AI compute capacity is growing at a pace that has surprised even industry insiders. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also said that the demand for AI computing has increased due to earlier expectations. Spending on AI technology across these industries is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2028. The major hyperscalers, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, together are expected to spend nearly $400 billion on data center infrastructure by 2025 alone.
Companies like CoreWeave have demonstrated the market potential of GPU-as-a-service infrastructure, delivering significant growth in revenue driven by enterprise customers including Microsoft.
A $1.9 billion data center plan won’t solve any problems by itself. Building a place is one thing. Ensuring they have 99.99% long-term power delivery is another thing. Data center workers working on AI jobs need reliable guarantees that Bitcoin miners, who only go down during blackouts, don’t.
Find out if Kazakhstan will get electricity production in line with the data center construction period. A new natural gas facility, a nuclear power deal, or a renewable energy deal would indicate that the government is willing to solve the problem.
