SEOUL, September 11 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's president says the country has finished the first stage of building a digital state and is now on the second, putting artificial intelligence to work for ordinary citizens.
The United Nations' most recent E-Government Survey, published in 2024, bears out the first part of that claim. It ranked Kazakhstan 24th of 193 countries, up from 28th two years earlier, and placed it in the top 10 for online services alongside South Korea, Denmark and Estonia. Among landlocked countries, Kazakhstan came first.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev drew the line between the two stages on Aug. 23, after voting in the first election for the Kurultai, the single-chamber parliament created under the country's new constitution.
"We are now at the second stage, and I have instructed the government not to remain at the so-called presentation stage or focus solely on international negotiations," he told reporters in Astana. "We must now put digitalization and artificial intelligence at the service of the people, all citizens of our country."
He measured that service in income, saying digital tools should help people earn money and run businesses, and that farmers in particular should be able to do so without leaving their home regions.
"Simply put, a smartphone is not just a toy," Tokayev said. "Nor is it merely a device for endlessly watching TikTok. A smartphone is a tool for making money."
Tokayev first set the goal of a fully digital state within three years in his Sept. 8, 2025, State of the Nation Address, titled "Kazakhstan in the Era of Artificial Intelligence." On Sept. 18, he signed a decree creating the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, and later that month he put Zhaslan Madiyev in charge of it with the rank of deputy prime minister.
Central Asia's first AI law followed in November 2025 and took effect Jan. 18. It holds the owners, holders and users of AI systems responsible according to the role each plays, and it gives legal footing to a national AI platform for developing, training and piloting models.
In his New Year address, Tokayev declared 2026 the Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.
By then the Alem.Cloud supercomputer in Astana had been running for half a year. Built on 512 Nvidia H200 graphics processors, it entered the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful machines in 86th place in November 2025 and trains the country's own large language models in Kazakh and Russian.
In June, the government signed agreements worth $10 billion with Nvidia and Firebird, a U.S. AI infrastructure company, to build Data Center Valley, a campus near Ekibastuz that could eventually hold as many as 100,000 graphics processors. Its first 125-megawatt facility is due in 2027.
Freedom Holding Corp. had signed its own deal with the ministry in November 2025 to develop a $2 billion sovereign AI hub on Nvidia infrastructure.
On the former EXPO 2017 grounds in Astana, Qazaq AI Research University began its first academic year this month with 400 bachelor's students, 308 of them on state grants, and 100 master's students.
Its bachelor's degrees take three years and are taught entirely in English. Samruk-Kazyna, the national sovereign wealth fund, is sending 100 of its own employees through the university's MBA AI+X program.
Universities across the country updated 1,983 degree programs this year to match emerging professions, Science and Higher Education Minister Sayasat Nurbek told a government meeting in September, compared with seven in 2022.
At Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, the national railway company, 113,000 employees received training in AI last year, according to figures presented to the government the same month.
In January, Kazakhstan became the first Central Asian country to join OpenAI's Education for Countries program. The deal, financed by Freedom Holding, puts 165,000 free ChatGPT Edu licenses in the hands of schoolteachers, university faculty and staff, and members of the Astana Hub technology park community. The government's broader goal is to train one million people in AI skills over five years.
A decree Tokayev signed on May 12 carries AI into secondary education from 2026 through 2029, beginning with pilot schools in the Pavlodar and Kyzylorda regions. The government expects the program to narrow the gap in quality between urban and rural schools.
Education officials said more than 350,000 teachers have completed training in digital tools, including AI assistants for the classroom.
At the first meeting of his Council for the Development of Artificial Intelligence last year, Tokayev warned that algorithms can produce inaccurate or oversimplified material. "It is people, not machines, who should be responsible for the quality and content of education," he said.
At the National Kurultai, a presidential advisory assembly that met in Kyzylorda in January, he linked the digital push to national identity.
"The reality is that in the new era, only those nations and states that succeed in digitizing their history and culture and integrating them into the global digital civilization will retain their agency," he said.
In August, Astana hosted the third International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, where more than 500 high school students from 106 countries competed after Tokayev opened the event on Aug. 3. At the previous edition in Beijing, students from Kazakhstan won three gold, one silver and three bronze medals.
Tokayev arrives in Seoul on Sept. 14 for a state visit at the invitation of President Lee Jae Myung. Talks on strengthening the enhanced strategic partnership between the two countries are set for Sept. 15, and he will also meet executives of leading South Korean companies.
At that first AI council meeting, he had cited South Korea's use of AI in language learning as an example of personalized education, which he said carries special meaning for a multiethnic country like Kazakhstan.
On Sept. 16, he will join the leaders of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan at the first Korea-Central Asia Summit.
*The author is the assistant editor of AJP.
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