NVIDIA said Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s largest telecommunications company, has deployed 400 NVIDIA H200 and 480 NVIDIA B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty, with plans to deploy more than 1,000 additional GPUs at each of two further sites next year. The figures appeared in an October 22, 2026 post bylined to NVIDIA Vice President Rev Lebaredian and published in the company’s GTC Berlin news sequence.
Deployed and Planned GPU Capacity
The post described Kazakhtelecom as the nation’s largest telecommunications company and stated it has already deployed 400 H200 and 480 B300 GPUs across the two cities. Next year, the company plans to deploy more than 1,000 GPUs in the Data Center Valley, along with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region. According to NVIDIA, that infrastructure is intended to serve diverse workloads that enterprises, developers and institutions can use at scale.
Lebaredian’s post framed the announcements as evidence that Kazakhstan’s AI ecosystem is moving from infrastructure planning to deployment, spanning what NVIDIA describes as the full AI stack: infrastructure, models and applications. More local capacity, the post stated, gives developers and companies room to train, fine-tune and serve increasingly capable models, with successful applications in turn creating demand for more compute.
Robotaxi Exploration in Astana
The post also disclosed that inDrive and Pony.ai are collaborating to explore robotaxi services in Kazakhstan, with Astana as the first deployment city. The companies will assess the feasibility of bringing Pony.ai’s seventh-generation robotaxis to the inDrive app, supported by NVIDIA AI infrastructure built on the NVIDIA Hyperion sensor and compute platform with the NVIDIA Halos safety system.
Pony.ai’s robotaxi platform has a documented compute history. In an April 25, 2026 announcement, the autonomous-driving technology company said it had developed an upgraded Level 4 autonomous-driving domain controller in collaboration with NVIDIA, built on the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform and powered by NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor with NVIDIA NVLink. With flexible single-chip and multi-chip configurations, the company said, the platform can link two DRIVE Thor chips for a combined maximum computing performance of 4,000 FP4 TFLOPS. Pony.ai stated it has partnered with NVIDIA since 2017, launched proprietary automotive-grade computing units powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips in 2022, and scaled in 2025 to what it described as the world’s first Level 4 domain controller featuring four DRIVE Orin X chips for its mass-produced seventh-generation Robotaxi.
The 2025 AI Factory and the June 2026 Agreements
Kazakhtelecom’s sovereign AI buildout began before this week’s announcement. On May 29, 2025, the company announced the launch of what it called Central Asia’s first commercial sovereign AI factory, powered by NVIDIA H200 GPUs with an estimated total performance of 56.4 petaflops (FP16) and scheduled to go live in summer 2025. Kazakhtelecom said the platform would be delivered as a cloud service to government institutions, private businesses, startups and universities throughout Kazakhstan, with full access to the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. Chairman of the Board Bagdat Mussin said at the time that the platform was intended to serve as the foundation for Kazakhstan’s digital sovereignty.
On June 15, 2026, Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov met Lebaredian and Firebird co-founders Razmig Hovaghimian and Alexander Yesayan. According to the Prime Minister’s office, agreements on artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure cooperation totaling $10 billion were signed following the meeting. They included a Strategic Cooperation Agreement between the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development and Firebird, establishing a framework for AI ecosystem development and the creation of Firebird Labs Kazakhstan at Alem.ai, and a Binding Term Sheet between Kazakhtelecom and Firebird outlining the technical and organizational parameters of cooperation within the Data Center Valley project.
The government release described the Data Center Valley as a flagship project in Ekibastuz, with 300 MW of power capacity already available and a design allowing phased expansion to 1 GW. Bektenov noted that 2026 has been declared Kazakhstan’s Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence and that the country had adopted the Digital Qazaqstan national strategy for digital transformation and AI development that week.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development Zhaslan Madiyev said the planned $10 billion investment would enable Kazakhstan to establish a large-scale computing cluster powered by 100,000 GPU chips, including NVIDIA GB300 and Vera Rubin, and estimated the project would generate at least $3 billion in annual export revenue. Firebird CEO Hovaghimian said a launch planned for 2027 would place Kazakhstan among the world’s top ten countries in AI infrastructure.
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