The signing ceremony took place in Ekibastuz, a coal-mining city in northeastern Kazakhstan known for one of the world’s largest power plants rather than for cloud computing. The government, the American company Firebird and NVIDIA signed a package of agreements worth $10 billion on June 15 to build the Valley Data Centre, a large AI computing facility, in the city, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Astana Times.
The division of labor follows the pattern of modern AI infrastructure. NVIDIA provides the technology and the chips; Firebird, a young American cloud company little known outside the industry, will operate the facility; Kazakhstan contributes land, power and a long-term commitment. Detailed capacity figures were not disclosed, and people familiar with the plans said the project’s scale will be phased in over several years.
Why Kazakhstan? The country sits between Europe and China, on data routes that connect both; it has cheap electricity from coal and hydro, wide open land, and a government that has made digital infrastructure a stated priority. For a data center industry that is running out of power in the West, those are rare assets. In the United States, utilities face multi-year queues for new connections; in Europe, grid capacity is scarce. The search for power is pushing the industry to energy-rich regions, from the Middle East to the Arctic, and Central Asia has joined the map.
The deal follows a path set by other resource-rich states. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have poured tens of billions into AI infrastructure as part of their economic transitions away from oil. Kazakhstan is the latest to bet that compute can do for a coal and mineral economy what hydrocarbons once did. The government has courted foreign technology investment for years, pitching its location, its resources and its stability, and the $10 billion project is the largest single commitment to land so far.
The NVIDIA angle is strategic as well as commercial. The chipmaker has increasingly sold compute ecosystems rather than individual chips, partnering with governments and national champions to build AI capacity around the world. Its role in Kazakhstan extends its reach into Central Asia, a region where China and Western companies are competing for digital influence. The arrangement also keeps NVIDIA’s technology at the center of a fast-growing market for national AI infrastructure.
Firebird’s role is the least familiar piece. The company, founded by young entrepreneurs, has made a specialty of matching governments with AI technology partners, and it has operated largely below the industry’s radar. The Kazakhstan project is its largest deal to date, according to people familiar with the matter, and it vaults the firm into the top tier of AI infrastructure operators.
The economics of the project are the open question. AI data centers require enormous power and cooling, and the economics depend on filling the capacity with paying workloads. Analysts noted that a large share of Kazakhstan’s announced investment projects have yet to break ground, and remote locations add risk: talent, equipment supply chains and connectivity all become harder far from the hubs. The facility is expected to support AI training and inference workloads, the two categories that consume the most power and the most chips, according to people familiar with the plans.
The project also fits Kazakhstan’s broader digital ambitions. The government has set targets for the share of the economy tied to technology, and it has opened the country to foreign cloud operators as part of a push to modernize beyond extractive industries. Data residency rules in neighboring markets give the facility a potential client base: companies that need computing inside the region but outside China and Russia, a category that includes much of Central Asia’s banking and logistics sectors. The agreements were signed the same day the country’s leaders touted a wider portfolio of investment projects, making the AI center one bet among many.
The geopolitical layer is impossible to ignore. Central Asia has become a contested space for digital infrastructure: China has built data and telecom capacity across the region, and Western companies are pushing in with their own projects. NVIDIA’s technology and an American operator give the Kazakhstan project a distinctly Western stamp, and the $10 billion figure makes it one of the largest such commitments in the region.
The deal is a bet in two directions. Kazakhstan is betting that AI infrastructure can turn a coal-mining region into a digital hub, and NVIDIA is betting that its technology standard travels beyond the markets that made it. The power plants of Ekibastuz have fed the grid for decades; the question now is whether they will feed servers too, and whether the $10 billion produces the transformation the signing ceremony promised.
