NVIDIA expands Kazakhstan AI infrastructure with Firebird

What happened

Firebird has secured a US export licence for 45,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs and has begun constructing the first phase of its installation at Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz, in partnership with Kazakhtelecom. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara.

Commercial operations are scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2027. Kazakhstan’s government previously announced agreements valued at $10 billion with Firebird and NVIDIA, including plans for a computing cluster containing up to 100,000 GPUs.

Construction updates published by Kazakhstan’s government in August confirmed that work was under way on an initial 50 MW facility. A 215 MW electrical substation had also been acquired, with the first facility expected to enter operation in June 2027.

Separately, Kazakhtelecom has already deployed 400 NVIDIA H200 GPUs and 480 NVIDIA B300 GPUs across Astana and Almaty. NVIDIA and US-based AI infrastructure company Firebird are expanding Kazakhstan AI infrastructure, with plans for tens of thousands of GPUs, new data centre (a building full of computers that runs online services) capacity and the deployment of NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform.

The announcement coincides with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to Kazakhstan on 23 October 2026. Huang met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Astana and participated in a discussion with Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, the country’s minister of artificial intelligence and digital development.

The broader Data Center Valley development has a longer-term expansion target of 1 GW. These figures represent different stages and scopes of the development rather than capacity already installed.