Data is the new gold. The data center is the vault.
Data centers are becoming the critical infrastructure of the 21st century. Kazakhstan is choosing the digital-autonomy path — with Central Asia's first Tier IV site.
The global digital economy is entering an era where data is the defining resource of national competitiveness. Data centers are no longer support infrastructure — they’re the critical infrastructure of the 21st century: the vault holding terabytes of data, compute capacity, and AI models where gold reserves used to be held.
Kazakhstan faces a choice: remain a consumer of external infrastructure, or claim the role of a regional digital-transit hub for global data and AI compute.
The natural shortage
The global market is already in systemic deficit. Capacity in Singapore, Japan, and Germany is booked 12–18 months before turn-up — often before construction starts. Generative AI requires a different engineering class: high power density per rack and serious cooling. Forecasts put DC investment at $5 trillion over the next five years and global capacity at 122 GW+ by 2030.
The pre-book trend showed up in Kazakhstan too. “We see it firsthand: our DC started getting reserved at the foundation stage. Companies act pragmatically — if they wait, there will be no free racks,” says Akashi CEO Vladislav Minkevich. Akashi’s first module is 61% reserved before turn-up.
Standards and geography
Kazakhstan’s ~3,800 commercial racks today can’t cover fintech, gov services, telco, and e-commerce loads, let alone tomorrow’s AI.
“Kazakhstan has outgrown the capacity we had,” Minkevich continues. “If we don’t build next-generation infrastructure, tomorrow we’ll import compute the way energy-dependent countries import electricity.”
Demand for Akashi capacity goes beyond the domestic market — clients include Chinese and US tech players sizing sites for cloud, CDN, and AI workloads.
The reference measure
Tier IV demands 2N duplication of all primary systems, which in turn demands substantial power. Kazakhstan is planning nuclear generation, but waiting for it would mean skipping several tech-growth cycles. Akashi is therefore building its own gas-fired generation, scalable to 1 GW.
“Solutions like ours set new industry standards: large DCs are no longer pure energy consumers — they’re complex industrial projects influencing power, telco, and adjacent sectors,” Minkevich concludes.