DataVolt and Nvidia Kick Off Central Asia's AI Data-Center Race

Two data-center projects have put Central Asia on the AI infrastructure map, and the geography is the story. Nikkei reports that the first phase of Saudi-backed DataVolt's TAS-1 facility in Uzbekistan will be completed by year-end, while an Nvidia-backed 125-megawatt build in Kazakhstan is targeted for 2027.

The Uzbek side is the smaller and nearer-term project. TAS-1, sited inside Tashkent's IT Park, is a 12-megawatt Tier-3 facility whose first six-megawatt phase is almost fully leased, according to Data Center Dynamics. DataVolt raised $150 million in non-recourse project financing from EBRD, Germany's DEG, France's Proparco and the OPEC Fund for International Development, on a build the EBRD prices at $250 million overall. Beeline Uzbekistan, part of Veon, is expected to be a major tenant, with the facility set to open in late 2026.

The Kazakhstan side is a different scale. The government signed a $10 billion agreement with Nvidia and US-based Firebird for a Data Center Valley near Ekibastuz in the northern Pavlodar region, with an initial 125-megawatt cluster of 100,000 Nvidia GB300 and Vera Rubin GPUs targeted to begin operations in 2027, according to The Astana Times. Nvidia Vice President Rev Lebaredian said the launch would place Kazakhstan among the world's top ten countries in AI infrastructure. Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, who also holds the AI and Digital Development portfolio, described the program as building a large-scale computing cluster.

Why this matters if you are not in Astana or Tashkent: large blocks of AI compute are being spun up outside the usual hyperscaler geographies, funded by Gulf capital, European development banks and a US chipmaker together, and the anchor customers reported so far are regional telcos and cloud providers rather than the frontier labs.

The honest caveats are real. The reporting does not spell out who the buyers of the Kazakhstan capacity will be beyond the Firebird partnership, or how a 125-megawatt AI cluster in Pavlodar will be powered. Take the specifics as reported, not settled. But the direction, that AI infrastructure is now being planned at this scale in places that were absent from the map a year ago, is the part worth watching.