A country spent twenty years being the punchline of a joke written by a man who had never been there. Then it took delivery of 496 GPUs, which was a rounding error, and fifteen months later Nvidia's founder landed in Astana with an export licence for forty five thousand. Here is the argument, in theses, with no hedging.
What the world thought Kazakhstan was, against what Kazakhstan was actually doing at the time.
A country of nineteen million people with no global brand was handed one for free, in the only currency that cannot be bought: recognition. Every Kazakh who has ever had to explain where they are from now skips a sentence. Ask Turkmenistan how the dignified alternative is working out. Nobody has ever made a joke about Turkmenistan, and nobody has ever thought about Turkmenistan.
In 2006 the government threatened lawsuits and ran ads in the New York Times. In 2020 the tourism board licensed the punchline and made "Very nice!" the official slogan. That is not a government with a sense of humour. That is a government that finally read the asset side of its own balance sheet.
2006 ban → 2020 sloganImanbek Zeikenov was a teenager in Aksu, Pavlodar region, studying rail transport and working at the railway station, making a remix of a four-year-old Saint Jhn track on a laptop in a town nobody outside the region can place. He did it without the artist's involvement. It went to the top of charts on three continents. He became the first Grammy winner in a non-classical category from anywhere in the former Soviet Union. Темір жол. The railway.
Best Remixed Recording, 63rd Grammys, March 2021Aksu. Stepnogorsk. Uralsk. Ekibastuz, whose power station has one of the tallest chimneys on earth. These are coal, rail and concrete towns in the middle of the largest landlocked country in the world, and in the last six years they have produced a Grammy, the biggest stand-up comedian in the Russian language, and a Nasdaq-listed super-app. The steppe is not empty. It was just offline.
From the retirement of the Space Shuttle in July 2011 to the first crewed Dragon in May 2020, every single human being who went to the International Space Station left Earth from Kazakh soil. American, Russian, Japanese, Italian. All of them. Through that entire decade the global mental image of the country remained a man in a mankini. Reputation is not a function of achievement. Reputation is a function of who is telling the story.
China banned mining in 2021 and within months Kazakhstan was the second largest bitcoin mining country on earth. Then the power went out, the tariffs came in, and the miners left. A less serious country would have concluded that compute is a curse. Kazakhstan concluded that it had been selling the cheapest possible product, in the dumbest possible way, to the least loyal customers available.
Now the part the pitch decks leave out. The lesson was not paid for by the state. Between 24 and 31 January 2022 the grid operator simply cut the miners off, a day before the blackouts reached the public. Then the Financial Monitoring Agency went in. Around a hundred and six operations were closed, roughly half of them not voluntarily, twenty five criminal cases were opened, and something in the order of 65,000 machines were seized, put by the agency at about 100 billion tenge. Legal operators were caught alongside the grey ones. Among those found to have been mining was the former president's brother.
So when someone tells you the watts are the moat, the correct question is whose watts, under what contract, and what happened to the last foreign operator who plugged in here. A lot of people lost their machines in this country and they are all still alive and still in this industry. That memory is priced in now, which is exactly why the Firebird deal is structured the way it is: a named counterparty in Kazakhtelecom, a licence issued in Washington, a site, a phased build, and a visit from Huang to put a face on it. None of that existed in 2021. The risk did not go away. It got documented.
~65,000 machines seized, Jan–Apr 2022Start with the concession. On 9 July 2025 the president personally switched on a national cluster in Astana: HPE Cray XD670 servers, 496 Nvidia H200s, straight in at number 86 in the world. The press called it historic. 496 GPUs is roughly one rack row, a rounding error against a single hyperscaler order, and anyone who follows this market knows it.
Then look at what happened fifteen months later. On 23 October 2026 Jensen Huang landed in Astana, his first visit, and Nvidia published a US export licence for 45,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs for Firebird in Kazakhstan. Ninety times the national cluster. The site is Data Center Valley at Ekibastuz, with Kazakhtelecom, starting at 125 MW and phased toward a gigawatt, against an investment package announced at up to $10 billion.
You can ship GPUs. You can ship engineers. You cannot ship a gigawatt, and you cannot ship December in Astana, where the free cooling is thirty degrees below zero. The question is why a company that can build anywhere builds there, and the answer comes from inside the country rather than from the press release.
23 Oct 2026 → 45,000 Grace Blackwell, Ekibastuz"The grid is bad. Moving power over distance is uneconomic and technically limited, so the whole capacity sits locked next to the plants. The country's economy cannot use it. The one consumer who can is the one who stands next to the station, and a data centre is mobile enough to do that. All data centres are built next to the generation, not on the grid. That is US practice. They are already buying up nuclear plants for them."
"And 2.5 cents is a statement, probably the price at the busbar. That is not the full cost to an end user, there is still the grid charge and the supply margin on top. If they hold it at four cents, fine."
Ilya Zashlyapin, Partner at SBS, strategy and project development across mining, energy and infrastructure in Central Asia. LinkedIn"They used to hate themselves for the coal stations. Nobody knew what to do about the ecology of it. And now Jensen himself turns up and contracts the capacity."
Oleg Zhumakhanov, entrepreneur and mentor, has worked with more than 400 founders. LinkedInWhich inverts the obvious reading. A weak grid looks like the flaw in the thesis, and it is the reason the thesis works: power that cannot be moved cannot be sold to anyone except whoever builds beside it. That also says exactly where this lands, and it is not Almaty or Astana. It is the coal in the north and the associated petroleum gas in the west, where the water is fine too. The south and the centre are out until there are reactors. And the cheap neighbouring power everyone points at, the flows from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, is already committed to balancing the system, with Uzbekistan building two reactors of its own and running a financial centre against Astana's. Nobody is handing Kazakhstan an advantage.
One caveat, so the cold does not get oversold. Winter is a real input for cooling and it is a lazy explanation for everything else. Kazakhstan put driverless cars on public roads in Astana first, and the obvious story is that the regulator opened a window there and the ice was the training set. I put that to someone who has run operations in the country, and he declined it.
"I do not think the regulation or the winter were decisive. More likely they simply started in the capital, and the road infrastructure there, the lane markings, is a little better."
Ulan Karazhigitov, strategy and operations in Almaty, ex-Microsoft, ex-McKinsey. LinkedInWhich is the more boring answer and probably the right one. The moat is the watts, not the weather.
Astana Hub, a tax regime, special visas, and then the names: Higgsfield as a generator of national founder morale, and now Nvidia itself. Anchor tenants, in the retail sense, the ones you can show to anybody without apologising. But an ecosystem is supposed to spread, and this one went vertical first.
"It is like anchor tenants in a shopping centre. You are not embarrassed to show them to anyone. There was not much of that level even in Russia."
"The ecosystem did not grow in width. A mycelium is supposed to be the size of the forest, it does not live under one birch tree. Here it somehow vertically integrated very fast, straight up to the most senior people in the industry."
And on whether the good founders stay: "I do not think leaving is bad. They went, they looked, they picked up the language. It is the archetypal arc: he grew, he learned to beat everyone, he decided he was great, he went out, he got hammered, he nearly died, he came back and put himself together again. And in a global world it is not even clear what leaving means. A Kazakh who built a company in Delaware, did he leave or not?"
Oleg Zhumakhanov, entrepreneur and mentor, has worked with more than 400 founders. LinkedInWhich is the most useful answer anyone gave me, because it refuses the question. The brain-drain framing assumes a founder is a resource a country either keeps or loses. He is describing a loop, and a loop only closes if there is something to come back to. That is what the anchor tenants are for.
Every eating apple on the planet descends from Malus sieversii, which still grows wild in the Tian Shan above Almaty. The city's old name, Alma-Ata, means father of apples. Tulips are from here too, not Holland. A country that gave the world its fruit and its favourite flower was, for two decades, internationally famous for a fictional antisemite.
A super-app out of Almaty listed on Nasdaq in January 2024, in a country most portfolio managers could not find on a map inside ten seconds. Payments, marketplace, deliveries, government services, all in one icon, with adoption numbers that Western banks discuss in strategy offsites and never achieve. Leapfrogging is not a metaphor here. There was nothing to leapfrog over.
Timur Turlov, a Kazakh citizen since 2022, took over the Kazakhstan Chess Federation in January 2023. On 28 September 2026, at the General Assembly in Samarkand, he was elected President of FIDE, the first Kazakh ever to lead the world chess federation, for a term running to 2030. He also runs Freedom Holding, which he founded in 2008 and which is listed on Nasdaq.
Read that back. The institution that is the global shorthand for intellect, patience and the long game, the one every empire has used to flatter itself, is now chaired from Almaty. Twenty years ago this country's entire international image was a man asking about his sister's prostitution rankings.
FIDE presidency, Samarkand, 28 Sept 2026And it is not a clean fairy tale, which is why it belongs here. Ukraine has sanctioned both Turlov and Freedom Holding over their Russian ties and the Ukrainian chess federation objected to his election, while Russia quietly dropped its own case against him around the same time. A Kazakh passport in 2026 is not a neutral document. It is a position taken between two neighbours who both want something, and that is the actual subject of this article.
Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich were classmates at the Republican Physics and Mathematics School in Alma-Ata, opened by decree of the Kazakh SSR in 1972. They both graduated with top marks, both were refused by Moscow State University, and they went on to build Yandex together, Segalovich naming it and running the technology until he died in 2013. Yandex is routinely described as one of the few search engines on earth to hold its home market against Google. Nobody describes it as Kazakh. It is the fourth time in this list that the country produced the thing and someone else got the sentence.
Volozh and Segalovich, classmates, Alma-AtaFor thirty years this country exported people. It now imports them, and not the ones you would guess. Timur Turlov surrendered a Russian passport and a Saint Kitts one to hold a Kazakh one, because Kazakhstan does not permit dual citizenship, which makes every one of these a burned bridge rather than a hedge. Arsen Tomsky pulled inDrive out of Russia in 2022, moved to Almaty, took the citizenship and announced it from a stage, and now says inDrive can fairly be called a Kazakhstani company. Forbes Kazakhstan lists him tenth among the country's richest. Between 2022 and 2024 Kazakhstan naturalised 6,665 Russian citizens and only a third of them were ethnic Kazakhs coming home. The athletes came too, because a Kazakh passport gets you into competitions a Russian one no longer does.
And it is not a sanctuary, so do not sell it as one. By 2026 Kazakh police were handing men who had fled mobilisation back across the border, and a deportation case turned the public mood. The passport is a door, and somebody controls the door.
Still: a country stops being a place people leave on the day its passport is worth more than the one they were born with. Here that took about three years, and it is much harder to fake than a GDP figure.
6,665 Russian citizens naturalised, 2022–24Kazakhstan mines more uranium than any other nation, by a wide margin. Every data centre operator now shopping for nuclear baseload is, at two removes, a Kazakh customer. There is no Borat for this. There should be.
Kazakh is moving from Cyrillic to Latin, with the target now 2031. Dismiss it as typography if you like. Script is the choice of which civilisation your children read in by default, and it is being made quietly, slowly, and without asking anyone's permission. Watch what a country does with its letters, not what it says at summits.
Borat was a British comedian. "Very nice!" was Kazakhstan licensing someone else's idea of itself, which is a clever move and still a borrowed one. Imanbek, Kaspi, Dimash, the stand-ups, the supercomputer: all of it is authored from the inside. That is the shift. Not that the country got good at things, it was always good at things. That it stopped needing a foreigner to introduce it.
I wanted one reading of the room from someone who had just been in it rather than writing about it from New York, so I asked a man who keynoted the Narxoz Leadership Forum in the last week.
"The first thing that hits you in Kazakhstan is the national lift. Kazakhs are proud of being Kazakh. More and more of them speak Kazakh. More national restaurants. The coffee breaks come with local pastries and kumys. More and more projects aimed at developing the country, the region, themselves."
"And they are not closing in. The opposite. They are after regional expansion and regional dominance. Kazakh companies are opening branches across Central Asia, and the country is open to the far abroad too."
"Talking to local entrepreneurs and managers, the impression is that it is all still ahead of them. You can feel the inspiration, the appetite, the optimism. Kazakhstan is developing. Kazakhs unquestionably believe in the future of their country, and it is hard not to, because the development is very fast. Airports, roads, whole cities are being built. Halyk Bank came from almost nowhere and turned into the main high tech player on the market, with more innovation than Tinkoff and Sber put together."
"And the level of economic development is still low. The Kazakhs complain about it themselves. A lot of it is not built yet. The traffic, the institutions, the administration."
Konstantin Krotov, Academic Dean at SKEMA US and Chair of the International Advisory Board at Narxoz Business School, keynote at the Narxoz Leadership Forum, October 2026. LinkedInNow notice which bank he names. From the outside the Kazakh fintech story is Kaspi, because Kaspi listed on Nasdaq and Nasdaq is where foreigners look. From inside the room it is Halyk. Same country, two different sentences, and the gap between them is what this entire piece has been about. The last thesis is not that Kazakhstan arrived. It is that the people who can see it arriving are finally the ones holding the microphone, and the rest of us are reading the translation a year late.
The single most successful piece of Kazakh comedy ever made contains no Kazakhs, no Kazakh language, and was filmed in Romania. For twenty years the country's comic identity was outsourced to a man who did a Polish-ish accent and called it Kazakh. That is the joke underneath the joke.
Meanwhile the real pipeline was running the whole time, and it ran through KVN, the Soviet university comedy league that functioned as Central Asia's unlicensed talent academy. Kazakh teams went to Moscow, won, and stayed. Azamat Musagaliev came out of Uralsk. Nurlan Saburov came out of Stepnogorsk in Akmola region, went to KVN, moved to Moscow in 2014, and became one of the largest stand-up acts in the Russian language, selling out arenas in a market of a hundred and fifty million people that was not his own.
And then the punchline turned. In February 2026 Russia detained Saburov at Vnukovo and banned him from the country for fifty years. Fifty. Not five. The official reasons were tax and migration; the unofficial reading, widely held, was that he had declined to say the right things about the war. A Kazakh comedian became too inconvenient for the market that made him.
Borat was a foreigner pretending to be a Kazakh and the world loved it. Saburov is a Kazakh refusing to pretend, and one government handed him a fifty year ban for it. Somewhere in the distance between those two facts is the whole story of this country's last twenty years.
So the comedy answer is this: Kazakhstan did not need to reclaim its humour. It had it. It needed the microphone, and the microphone turned out to be a phone with a TikTok app on it, which is also how the Grammy happened.
Not the phrasebook ones. The ones you actually hear, said at the volume they are actually said at.
You killed it. That was filthy. Said to a friend who just did something better than you expected and slightly better than you wanted. English reached for "fire" and had to borrow it from a different language. Kazakh went the other way and froze the thing.
Oh no. Oh my god. Holy hell. Are you serious. Entirely decided by tone and vowel length. Twenty million people run most of their emotional range through two syllables, and it works. Stretch it and it is grief. Clip it and it is delight.
Admiration with a grudge inside it. Said looking at someone else's car, someone else's wedding, someone else's life. Not quite envy, not quite a compliment. English has no word for wanting what someone has and being glad for them anyway, which says more about English.
A one word verdict on a person, and the highest one available. Not successful, not impressive. Solid. He does what he said he would. Deployed about men, businesses and occasionally a good decision, never about anything decorative.
To hell with it. Forget it. Walk away. A curse aimed at a situation rather than a person, which makes it usable in front of your mother, barely. The closest English gets is four letters and will cost you a client.
The code word. A jigit is a man who carries himself correctly: he pays, he shows up, he does not explain himself and he does not whine. You can be forty and not be one. You can be nineteen and be one. No English equivalent survives translation without sounding like a cologne advert.
Қап! (qap) damn it, short and sharp, the sound of a plan failing. Ақымақ (aqymaq) idiot, affectionate or not depending entirely on who is saying it. Бәсе! (base) there it is, I knew it, the satisfaction of being proved right out loud. Жүрдік (jurdik) we out.
There are two genuinely filthy ones that carry this register better than any of the above, and I am leaving them out on purpose, because this version is going on LinkedIn and one of them is a word for a female dog doing a lot of work it was never designed for. Ask me off the record.
Declaring my interest, because I have one.
SAP, the 2000s. I was auditing and building financial processes in Kazakhstan. My interest was frankly ethnographic: go, present the processes, eat at Alasha, talk to people, and try to work out a country that reads as very close to Russia in mentality and turns out to be nothing like it.
Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, 2020. I consulted for the national railway's digitalisation department. They wanted my rail record: I had been executive director of a startup doing predictive analytics for locomotives, second in the world after GE Transportation on the algorithms. I spent weeks with their departments, their engineers and their mechanics, walking through cases where the data let us extend maintenance intervals. A month later their chief mechanic called and said the intervals do not work, our trains have stopped. I asked him one question. On what data did you extend them? Silence on the line. It was funny and it was not.
Kazakh founders in the States. Fast, precise, they pick things up immediately and nothing foreign puts them off. None of the imperial reflex I know from the inside, the one where ours is good because it is ours and theirs is bad because it is theirs. They take international practice, keep what works and quietly drop the rest. Although, as Oleg puts it, the Kazakh понты are not going anywhere.
Duke. Fuqua ran a multi-year MBA programme with Nazarbayev University, so Kazakhs treat Duke as a second alma mater, and it happens to be mine. That sense of belonging to an American school is unusually strong there. It makes me warm towards them, and I have never once forgotten that the East is a delicate matter.
So here is my actual position, since the rest of this is opinion anyway. The resource trap caught the Netherlands, Norway beat it, Russia did not. Kazakhstan is the live experiment, and the question was never the GPUs. It is whether a country can change its own track. I believe in the potential, I want to watch the next moves, and I would like to work with them.
Ga^3in VC
I am a General Partner at Ga^3in VC in New York, and I am opening a Central Asia lane. On Thursday 29 October I am putting ten vetted AI startups in front of a VC bench in Manhattan, our 38th forum.
Building something in or out of Central Asia? Apply at bit.ly/gainpitch.