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November 15, 2026 - Central Asian governments are rushing to join the global AI race. And they're going big.
NVIDIA has partnered with US infrastructure firm Firebird and Kazakhtelecom on Data Center Valley, a project in Kazakhstan billed as Central Asia’s largest AI infrastructure development.
Uzbekistan is pursuing similar ambitions under its Digital Uzbekistan 2030 strategy, offering tax and customs exemptions through 2040 for qualifying data-center investments. And Tajikistan announced plans in October for a regional AI innovation hub supported by US chipmaker Nvidia’s Global AI Nations program.
Critics of Central Asia’s AI ambitions, however, have flagged shaky financing, reliance on coal-fired power in countries already facing electricity shortfalls, and a lack of transparency in a region long plagued by corruption.
Data Center Valley
With an announced price tag of $10 billion for its initial rollout, backers of Data Center Valley say it will turn Kazakhstan into a major exporter of AI computing power. When then-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited Astana in October, he said the initial expansion of the project could eventually reach 1 gigawatt (GW) of power capacity for servers and equipment, with longer-term ambitions of up to 5 GW.
During a televised conversation with Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister and Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, Huang presented the country as ideally placed to become a major player in the global AI industry.
“While the rest of the world is deciding how to engage and how to build an AI economy, here in Kazakhstan, you are doing it already," Huang said. "Kazakhstan has a fundamental advantage because you have so much natural resources already and you have so much energy. Instead of just exporting energy in the future, you could transform the energy into intelligence and export intelligence."
Marat Beksultanov, a New York-based geospatial analyst and CEO of GeoBox, a satellite analytics and remote-sensing company specializing in water management and precision agriculture in Central Asia, questioned the finances behind Data Center Valley.
“The biggest pitfall is that it's majority-financed by the Kazakh government," Beksultanov said. "There's very little, if any, private money that goes into this. And it's financing and funding this project before anybody committed to using it. And that's the other side of it. So, there's very little that we know of in terms of who will be the ultimate customer for this particular project."
In Kazakhstan, Huang said that the country could turn its energy resources into computing power and export it to European markets. The Data Center Valley project is close to the coal-fired Ekibastuz GRES-1 power plant.
But Beksultanov said that could be a problem. “European companies are the customers least willing to buy dirty power. Many of them must report the carbon footprint of the services they buy, including cloud computing. A data center running on Ekibastuz coal adds to that footprint. To sell to Europe, the project needs clean power it does not have,” the GeoBox CEO said.
Whether Kazakhstan produces enough electricity to run large data centers is also unclear. “Kazakhstan does not produce enough electricity for itself today. In 2025, it generated 123.1 billion kilowatt-hours and used 124.6 billion. The gap was covered by imports from Russia,” Beksultanov said.
The Kazakh government has promised Data Center Valley a fixed, low power price for 20 years, while local businesses pay considerably more. Critics of the project say that adding a major new consumer could put further pressure on the Kazakh power network and may leave the country prone to nationwide outages.
There is also the question of transparency in a country that ranked 96th out of 182 countries in Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index.
“What the public doesn't see are the papers that decide who pays: the power contract, the lease with Firebird, and the source of the electricity discount. None of them have been published,” Beksultanov said.
'Purely A PR Exercise'
It isn't only Kazakhstan expanding its AI sector. Saudi-based DataVolt is building a 12 MW liquid-cooled facility in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and plans to invest about $3 billion in later phases, potentially expanding capacity to 500 MW. (AI data centers need powerful cooling because the chips that run artificial intelligence generate large amounts of heat.) DataVolt has identified Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon as technology giants it hopes to attract.
Kyrgyzstan is courting Chinese firms including Inspur, Huawei, and ZTE. StarOcean Investment recently signed an agreement to develop an energy-intensive industrial park -- targeted at data centers and AI computing capacity -- in a 200-hectare zone in the Naryn Free Economic Zone in central Kyrgyzstan.
Even Turkmenistan, with its outdated Internet infrastructure and highly authoritarian system, wants to ride the AI wave. Deputy Energy Minister Serdar Saparov recently said the country was holding preliminary talks with international companies about data centers. Singapore-based Bitdeer Technologies Group has also presented a proposal to turn Turkmenistan’s energy resources into computing capacity, including AI data processing.
A former Turkmen government official familiar with the country’s energy projects, who spoke to RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service on condition of anonymity due to security risks, describes Ashgabat’s data-center announcements as “purely a PR exercise,” driven partly by regional rivalry.
“If neighboring countries already have something, we must not fall behind. Even if it amounts to nothing more than words,” the official said.
He also questioned whether Turkmenistan has the infrastructure to support such facilities. “High temperatures during most of the year would significantly increase operating costs because of the need for cooling,” he said, adding that water-saving technologies are available but make data centers more expensive to run.
The former official warned that Turkmenistan's electricity grids are deteriorating and would require “enormous investment,” citing a recent blackout that affected the region.
Water Controversy
Data centers are already facing growing public pushback and tighter restrictions in the United States and Europe over soaring power bills, grid strain, and heavy water use.
A recent policy brief by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) warns that Central Asia now risks walking into the same trap: Data centers consume large amounts of electricity and water in an already water-stressed part of the world.
Their demand could put additional pressure on supplies used by households, farms, and energy producers. Central Asia also lacks comprehensive requirements for data center operators to report their water consumption.
UNECE recommends that governments require operators to disclose water use, take local water scarcity into account when approving sites, and prioritize low-water renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.
In a written reply to RFE/RL, the agency declined to “comment on member states’ policy decisions.” It noted, however, that several Central Asian countries are parties to its environmental conventions on water cooperation, public participation, environmental impact assessment, and industrial accident prevention. Some provisions of these treaties, it added, “might apply to some of these projects, should they materialize.”
For Beksultanov, the central question remains whether Central Asian governments are weighing those long-term costs before spending billions.
“Central Asia is well positioned to become a digital Silk Road, but there has to be a careful balance between ambition and reality,” he said. “Right now, public money is being spent without any private commitment. It’s basically the old ‘build it and they will come’ approach. But what if they don’t? What’s going to happen then?” |
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