Kazakhstan Builds Its Case as a Regional AI Hub

Kazakhstan is pushing to become a regional artificial intelligence centre, with AI now central to its branding and modernisation agenda. In late 2025, Samruk-Kazyna, the country's sovereign wealth fund, gave voting rights to an AI programme called SKAI, its first non-human board member, to support transparency and governance.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared 2026 the "Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence". The government created a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development in 2025 and approved an action plan through 2029 covering AI literacy in schools and universities, healthcare, public services, tax collection and energy. Kazakhstan also became the second jurisdiction after the European Union to pass a law governing AI.

At Astana Hub, Central Asia's largest innovation cluster, hundreds of schoolchildren learn programming, generative AI, 3D animation and motion design for free. The "Tomorrow School" trains adults; of 25,000 applicants, fewer than 2 percent were selected, and 500 people have been trained in 18 months. Managing director Valeria Tio called it "a real social elevator".

Yuri Misnik, chief technology officer at InDrive, said Kazakhstan "is still far away from becoming a Silicon Valley, but it is becoming a regional AI centre", citing proximity to China. Astana Hub has incubated Higgsfield, the country's first unicorn, and hopes for five by 2030.

At Nazarbayev University, the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence built a Kazakh-language model after finding Siri and Alexa did not recognise Kazakh. MagniSoz works with text and audio in 11 languages; Oylan handles images in English, Russian and Kazakh. Executive director Yerbol Absalyamov said it is deployed locally and open source, guided by "AI for good" and "AI for Kazakhstan".

Concerns remain. Tlegen Kuandykov of CAPS Unlock said Kazakhstan imports power at peak times, grids are old, and no environmental assessment of data centre cooling has been made public, calling the transparency gap "a real policy failure". He also warned that enforcement of the AI law is unclear and biometric identification and facial recognition are being rolled out rapidly.

Source: Al Jazeera