Kazakhstan Begins Installing Region’s Most Powerful Supercomputer In Almaty

Kazakhstan has started assembling what officials say will be Central Asia’s most capable supercomputer at a Kazakhtelecom facility in Almaty, with the system expected to be brought online in about 10 days. The machine is built around NVIDIA H200 graphics processors and features roughly 6.7 million compute cores, a raw throughput of about 1,600 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, and tens of terabytes of graphics memory — figures that place it close to the highest-performing systems worldwide. By comparison, the U.S. supercomputer El Capitan has a measured peak near 1,742 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, according to international rankings.

Bagdat Mussin, chief executive of Kazakhtelecom, inspected the shipment of equipment at a storage site and described the arrival as a major step toward keeping heavy computing work inside the country rather than sending it to servers abroad. “We checked the delivery and were relieved to see the accelerators and racks have arrived intact,” he said, adding that the setup will allow Kazakh organizations to access advanced computing without routing data to Europe or the United States. Mussin said the crates contained the core hardware and that installation will proceed immediately.

Officials say the system will be made available to state agencies, state-owned enterprises, private companies, software developers and independent AI researchers. Planned uses include simulating technology-related risks, predicting traffic flows in cities, supporting clinical work and creating AI tools tailored to the Kazakh language and cultural context. The Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry has promoted the project as a way to boost the country’s standing in artificial intelligence research and to provide rentable capacity for firms in Kazakhstan and neighboring states.

The shipment benefited from an exemption from customs duties and value-added tax, a move the government says improves Kazakhstan’s attractiveness to foreign IT firms and data-center investors. The project did face earlier regulatory hurdles linked to export licensing from suppliers abroad, which caused delays before the hardware finally arrived in May. A local technology analyst said the duty waiver and the presence of domestic high-performance kit could make the country more competitive for regional cloud and AI workloads, though she cautioned that hardware alone won’t create an ecosystem without investment in power, cooling and specialist talent.

The development comes as other countries deepen investments in supercomputing. British authorities recently outlined plans to spend about $1 billion on a national machine in Edinburgh for medical and scientific AI work. Observers say Kazakhstan’s move signals growing regional demand for onshore compute capacity and raises fresh questions about energy use, data governance and how quickly local researchers and companies can make effective use of the new resource.