Firebird gets a US license for 45,000 NVIDIA GPUs in Kazakhstan as Jensen Huang visits

A 45,000-GPU licence signed at the presidential palace

NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang spent Friday, 23 October 2026, in Astana, and the biggest number of the day came from a company he does not run. Firebird, a cloud company that builds AI data centres, signed an investment agreement with the government of Kazakhstan at the Akorda presidential palace. According to NVIDIA's account of the visit, Firebird has secured a US export licence for 45,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs for the country.

The first phase is under construction with Kazakhtelecom, the national telecom operator, at a site called Data Center Valley, and it is aiming for a commercial launch in the third quarter of 2027. A planned second phase would take Firebird's total potential AI infrastructure capacity in Kazakhstan to about 500 megawatts. Firebird already runs a first AI factory in Armenia, and Kazakhstan is its second country.

Firebird co-founder and chief executive Razmig Hovaghimian attended the signing. "What began as a seed of an idea 180 days ago has grown into a major investment in Kazakhstan's AI future," he said, crediting President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's vision for giving the company the confidence to think bigger. Firebird also plans to set up Firebird Labs Kazakhstan to support local startups, research and talent through funding, access to compute and research partnerships.

Why the export licence is the real news

The US requires licences for shipments of its most advanced AI chips to many countries, partly out of concern that chips could be diverted to China, and this deal needed one. Large deployments outside close US allies therefore depend on Washington's approval, not only on money and power supply. A licence for 45,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs is a large one by the standards of any single country outside the biggest markets.

The announcement does not say when the licence was granted, what conditions came with it, or how the chips will be delivered over time. Licences of this kind usually carry security and reporting requirements, such as limits on who may rent the capacity, but none are described in the material published so far. The licence covers the right to import the chips; the commercial launch is still almost a year away.

Firebird has also not said how the build will be financed or what it expects to charge. The figures that have been made public are the GPU count, the 500-megawatt ceiling for both phases, the partner and the launch target. For context, 500 megawatts is the scale of a large campus by today's standards, though the second phase is described only as planned.

Kazakhtelecom's own GPUs

Firebird's project sits on top of capacity Kazakhstan already has. NVIDIA says Kazakhtelecom, the country's largest telecommunications company, has deployed 400 NVIDIA H200 and 480 NVIDIA B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty. Next year it plans to add more than 1,000 GPUs in Data Center Valley and more than 1,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region, a coal and power centre in the north-east of the country.

Vera Rubin is NVIDIA's next GPU generation after Blackwell, and the company has been pushing ready-made ways to deploy it quickly, such as its containerised DSX Pod AI factories. Kazakhtelecom says its systems will serve enterprises, developers and institutions, which makes it the country's main public-facing source of AI compute until Firebird's site opens.

Placing hardware in Ekibastuz fits the argument Huang made all day. Kazakhstan is a major producer of coal, oil, gas and uranium, and power is now the main limit on where AI data centres can be built. The material from the visit does not say how the new sites will be powered or what share of the energy will be low-carbon.

Huang's pitch: export intelligence, not just energy

Huang met Tokayev at Akorda and then joined Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, who is also Kazakhstan's minister of AI and digital development, for a public fireside chat at Alem.AI, the country's international AI centre. His central argument was about energy. "Instead of just exporting energy, in the future, you could transform energy into intelligence and export intelligence," he said.

He paired that with an argument about data. "Your country's data is your natural resource. It belongs to you," he said, describing local data as a record of a nation's culture, history and values. Madiyev said Kazakhstan wants AI that understands and speaks Kazakh and captures cultural context, and pointed to the country's work on Kazakh-language models.

Madiyev also asked how Kazakhstan could become a hub for training models for robots and other physical systems, citing its factories, mines, farms, transport and logistics. Huang called the idea fantastic. In his meeting with the president, according to The Astana Times, he went further and proposed positioning Kazakhstan as a global hub for physical AI, saying AI needs energy and people trained in science, mathematics and technology, and that the country has potential in each.

Tokayev told Huang the visit gave serious momentum to cooperation with NVIDIA and noted that Kazakhstan has declared 2026 its Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. He presented Huang with an honorary black belt in judo and the Order of Dostyk, First Class, a state award whose name means friendship, for his contribution to AI in Kazakhstan.

Higgsfield, robotaxis and the local startup scene

NVIDIA also said during the event that it is investing in Higgsfield AI, the Kazakhstan-founded maker of generative video tools that recently connected its Katana tools to Claude. NVIDIA did not give the size of the investment in its post. Huang praised the founders, saying "the first thing and the last thing is you invest in people, not companies." Higgsfield is also expanding its infrastructure on Vera Rubin through cloud providers, NVIDIA said, and Tokayev told Huang the country was proud to see NVIDIA working with a domestic company.

The visit also showcased a plan from inDrive and Pony.ai, which we covered on Friday, to explore robotaxi services in Kazakhstan starting in Astana, using Pony.ai's seventh-generation vehicles on NVIDIA's Hyperion platform. That is the kind of physical AI project Madiyev described, though it is at the feasibility stage.

Asked about AI security at Alem.AI, Huang pointed to NVIDIA's OpenShell, which he described as a way to contain AI agents by limiting their access to files and tools and monitoring what they do. He also told students to learn how AI works rather than only how to use it.

What to watch

The day fits a pattern NVIDIA has followed for two years: Huang visits a capital, praises its sovereign AI ambitions, and local operators announce GPU deals. The announcements are real, but they mix built capacity with plans. Of everything described in Astana, only Kazakhtelecom's 880 H200 and B300 GPUs are running today. The rest depends on construction, power and chip deliveries through 2027.

The questions worth tracking are when the first Firebird GPUs arrive, what conditions the US licence imposes on customers, how the sites will be powered, and whether demand inside Kazakhstan and the wider region will fill hundreds of megawatts. Huang's pitch is that the country can sell intelligence the way it sells energy. The licence gives it the hardware to try; customers will decide whether it works.