Central Asia's data center race heats up with massive Kazakh facility
Source: Nikkei
Kazakhstan is building a 125MW data center with 100,000 Nvidia chips by 2027, while Uzbekistan's TAS-1 facility (6MW) comes online by year-end. AI infrastructure buildout is no longer concentrated in the US, China, and Western Europe. Central Asia offers cheap electricity, geopolitical distance from Western sanctions regimes, and strategic positioning between China and Russia—making it an attractive alternative hub for both Western cloud providers hedging geopolitical risk and Chinese companies seeking redundancy. The scale differential (6MW vs. 125MW) positions Kazakhstan as the region's primary AI compute supplier rather than Uzbekistan, reshaping investment patterns in post-Soviet markets.