‘Data-Center Valley’ in Kazakhstan draws G42, an Emirati bet on gigawatt-scale computing architecture

At the AI and Digital Bridge 2026 forum in Astana, Kazakhstan, the forum unveiled the contours of a regional and industrial race that goes beyond traditional data-center boundaries, after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev held an extensive series of talks with international technology and investment leaders, topped by plans to create the "Data-Center Valley" project in the city of Ekibastuz. The project is designed to provide computing infrastructure starting with an operating capacity of about 300 megawatts, with the ability to scale up to a full gigawatt, reflecting Kazakhstan’s aim to secure a place in the high-performance computing power supply chains aimed at AI models.

The Emirati delegation was at the center of these moves, led by Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Saheel al-Mazrouei, alongside Mansour al-Mansouri, head of Abu Dhabi’s Health Authority and CEO of G42 International.The two sides discussed the anticipated role of G42 in developing the Ekibastuz project, as well as monitoring the existing projects of Bright AI in Kazakhstan, which include high-performance computing infrastructure, smart-city solutions, and a national visual traffic-monitoring system. The partnership is no longer just preliminary understandings, as official data showed that the United Arab Emirates’ direct investments in Kazakhstan reached $1.64 billion in 2025, a rise of three-and-a-half times, placing the UAE among the top ten foreign investors in the country.

The computing pathway remains linked to major hardware vendors, as Kazakh President Riv Lebaridian, vice-president of Nvidia, met to discuss expanding practical AI applications, its infrastructure and integration with the Data-Center Valley. Kazakhstan already operates two super-computing clusters based on Nvidia technology, giving it a technical base to double its processing capacity. These discussions coincided with a meeting between Tokayev and William Ford, chairman and CEO of the global investment firm General Atlantic, who outlined investment opportunities in fintech, e-commerce, software and energy, expressing explicit interest in participating in the Ekibastuz complex.

Domestically, Tokayev presented a suite of national digital projects that reflect attempts to build a self-sufficient tech environment, including an AI-enabled university model developed by the Kazakh University for AI research, the initiatives “Kazakhstan Trusted” and “Alpha”, new features for the national messaging app “Aitu”, as well as software solutions created by the sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna and Hedgefield AI, and robotics projects. The Kazakh president honored Emirati officials Saheel al-Mazrouei and Mansour al-Mansouri with the second-class Dostik Friendship Medal, recognizing their role in strengthening bilateral ties that also encompassed port and logistics corridor projects such as the Middle Corridor and a corridor through Afghanistan.

This external expansion of Emirati sovereign and investment technology firms directly signals what is shifting in the tech-industry map across the Gulf and the broader Arab region.Major companies in Abu Dhabi no longer focus solely on localising computing infrastructure within their geographic borders, but have turned to exporting smart-city systems and high-performance computing packages, targeting direct stakes in computing-energy complexes near generation sources in Central Asia. This shift implies for tech leaders and cloud-infrastructure teams in the Gulf and Egypt that the future architecture for managing and operating massive models is moving toward cross-border hybrid environments that leverage low-cost-energy external compute centers for heavy training and processing tasks without draining local distribution networks.

Building compute complexes with capacities up to a full gigawatt, backed by Gulf and international investment, confirms that AI competitiveness has fundamentally become a matter of securing advanced power supplies and hardware. Closely monitor the alliance map being forged by regional players in Central Asia, as the linkage between abundant energy in those markets and investment and advanced hardware networks is the pathway that will reprice inference services and infrastructure costs for organisations in the region in the future.