During his first visit to Kazakhstan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the country’s growing computing capacity could make it a major AI hub for Europe, as Kazakhstan expands its energy and digital infrastructure

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has visited Kazakhstan for the first time, saying the Central Asian country could emerge as a major AI computing hub for Europe.

Huang made the remarks during a fireside chat with Zhaslan Madiyev, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, at the Alem.ai International Artificial Intelligence Centre in Astana.

During the discussion, Madiyev said Kazakhstan plans to nearly double its installed power capacity to more than 40 gigawatts by 2035 as the country expands the infrastructure needed to support its growing AI sector.

One of its flagship projects is the Data Center Valley, a large-scale AI computing campus under development in Ekibastuz, one of Kazakhstan’s main power-generating centres. Its first 50-megawatt phase is expected to begin operations in 2027, while the project’s energy infrastructure could eventually scale up to one gigawatt.

Huang said Kazakhstan’s energy resources and growing computing capacity could give the country a significant role in Europe’s AI ecosystem.

“Kazakhstan has a lot of real estate. It also has a lot of energy,” Huang said. “You’re going to have a lot of compute right here in Kazakhstan. It’s going to be a hub, a computing hub, an AI factory hub for all of Europe.”

Huang described the country’s abundant energy resources as a potential competitive advantage in the AI economy, arguing that electricity could increasingly be used to generate computing power and AI rather than simply being exported as energy.

“Kazakhstan has a fundamental advantage because you have so much natural resource already. You have so much energy, and instead of just exporting energy in the future, you could transform the energy into intelligence and export intelligence,” Huang said.

Sovereign AI

But energy alone, Huang argued, will not be enough. Kazakhstan will also need to retain control over another resource — its data.

Madiyev said the country is already developing Kazakh-language large language models based on open-source foundation models and asked whether Kazakhstan should eventually build its own foundation model from scratch.

Huang said building a domestic foundation model “makes complete sense”, describing it as a national security concern.

He argued that countries should retain control over both their data and the AI infrastructure used to serve their citizens, comparing it to other essential national infrastructure.

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