Freedom Holding, NVIDIA and Citi build 100MW AI hub in Kazakhstan

Freedom Holding Corp., NVIDIA and Citi are partnering with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development on a planned 100-megawatt Tier IV GPU data centre in Kazakhstan. The project is framed as a sovereign AI hub with an estimated $2 billion investment and is intended to serve government agencies, financial firms and academic researchers.

The initiative is organized under a trilateral memorandum announced through the Foreign Investors’ Council. Public documents describe a facility built to Tier IV standards for high availability and designed for large-scale GPU computing. The planned site is expected to house about 4,224 server racks and support enterprise AI workloads, model training and government computing tasks.

Project materials indicate the hub will support three primary user groups: government administration functions such as automated risk modeling and tax analysis; fintech and capital markets use cases including algorithmic trading and real-time credit underwriting; and academic and research institutions conducting localized AI training on regional language and demographic data. Early commercial agreements reportedly cover more than 60% of planned capacity, with clients from Kazakhstan, China and the United States reserving space.

NVIDIA is listed as the technology provider for the GPU architecture that underlies the centre’s compute. Citi is named for financial structuring and international market access for the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure. Freedom Holding is the local anchor and is reported to be supporting the project from a balance sheet with $13.155 billion in total assets.

Company filings show Freedom Holding reported about $2.191 billion in annual revenue and $153.3 million in net income. The bank and brokerage unit figures include growth in banking customers to roughly 5.03 million and about 858,000 retail brokerage accounts. Project disclosures say part of the investment will come from the company’s expanding balance sheet rather than relying wholly on external debt.

Industry reporting cited in project materials estimates that third-party AI processing can account for roughly 25%–35% of digital banking operational budgets. Project planners present the centre as a way to convert recurring API costs into owned compute capacity and to provide lower-latency, large-model training capabilities for high-volume users.

The hub is one element of a broader regional infrastructure plan. Freedom Holding has outlined a 100MW Akashi data centre in Astana with a 99.995% availability target and a separate Almaty facility linked to a cloud partnership. The company has also disclosed a collaboration with Nokia on an innovation lab focused on AI networking and telecom architectures.

Project documents note the power demands of a 100MW data centre, which require stable electricity supply and energy-efficient design. Kazakhstan’s national AI strategy cited in the framework lists goals to strengthen data sovereignty, expand domestic compute capacity and develop AI talent; planners expect accompanying training and research programs to build local engineering skills.

Operational timelines and detailed commercial terms for the sovereign AI hub have not been disclosed. Project statements estimate early commercial computing agreements could generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue in the first full year of operation.