Kazakhstan just signed an agreement to build out a $1.9B data center complex, betting that its geographic position and energy resources can turn it into a serious player in the global compute race. There’s one problem: the country doesn’t currently have enough electricity to power what it already has.
The deal, signed between Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development and an international consortium, is the centerpiece of the government’s plan to transform the Central Asian nation into a data center hub. The project’s timeline, however, is explicitly tied to Kazakhstan’s ability to close an existing power deficit.
The global compute land grab
Major tech companies are expected to invest nearly $400B in cloud infrastructure by 2025. SoftBank and OpenAI’s Stargate project alone could funnel up to $500B into AI data center expansion globally. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been vocal about a global shortage of AI compute capacity, essentially telling every country with a power grid that there’s money on the table.
For years, Kazakhstan was one of the world’s top destinations for Bitcoin mining, with operators drawn by cheap electricity and relatively lax oversight. At its peak, the country ranked among the top three nations globally for Bitcoin hashrate. That informal crypto mining boom strained the national grid so badly that Kazakhstan imposed restrictions and taxes on mining operations starting in 2022.
