Kazakhstan : Start-ups d’IA innovantes et infrastructures informatiques de nouvelle génération
Avec l'ambition de diriger le secteur naissant de l'IA en Asie centrale, le Kazakhstan lance un pôle mondial pour développer des start-ups, de la salle de classe au marché.
00:30Welcome to EastWestConnect. We're highlighting business and economic developments in Kazakhstan and the wider Central Asia region, connecting with Europe and beyond.
00:39Kazakhstan unveiled its first and largest supercomputer this summer. Powered by NVIDIA chips and built for AI research, it can perform two quintillion calculations per second.
00:48We sat down with Jaslan Madiev, Deputy Prime Minister, overseeing artificial intelligence and digital development to explore how the nation is shaping its AI ecosystem.
01:00We are opening other supercomputer clusters. We have a supercomputer GPU cluster in the U.S., in Silicon Valley, in Texas.
01:07Now opening another supercomputer cluster in Almaty.
01:10So this is the important computing infrastructure that will be available for startups, science centers, research and R&D centers, universities, Samruk Kazina holding company and national companies and government bodies.
01:28So this is for developing of AI agents, AI products and embedding AI into the economy.
01:36On the top of that, we have built several Kazakh large language models, which will be used by those platforms.
01:42And from the digital sovereignty perspective, it's a very important step.
01:48We have our Kazakh LLM on meta, foundational models like LAMA.
01:55We have E-Lightning and DeepSeq, and it's open source.
01:58Beyond the first Kazakh large language model, should we expect any other game changers on the horizon?
02:04LLM AI, international AI center, is like a big funnel starting from the general public and going through the kids, students, startups, big techs, and the best solutions will be embedded into the economy sector.
02:20It's a big center of competence, 20 plus thousand square meters building, eight floors.
02:26On the second and third floor, we will launch two more education, school kids of age of 12 to 18.
02:34We'll cover 11 areas, generative AI, robotics, 3D modeling, filmmaking, music making, so the creative industry also will be covered.
02:44On the fourth and fifth floor, we'll be having tomorrow school, launching it together with Nicolas Adirac, a famous entrepreneur from France.
02:53On the sixth floor, we will have AI campus for startups with our acceleration programs.
03:01We are exclusive partner of Google for startups.
03:03We have acceleration program with Draper University, StarTex from Stanford, Alchemist B2B Accelerator.
03:11We have our own homemade accelerator program, AIpreneurs, where people come as individuals.
03:18We give them data sets, GPUs, we give large language models, and they graduate as startups.
03:26So it will be like the factory of startups.
03:29On the seventh floor, we'll have big tech offices, R&D labs, AI centers.
03:35Mr. Deputy Prime Minister, thank you so much.
03:37Thank you. My pleasure.
03:38Kazakhstan is positioning itself as Central Asia's gateway to global tech, connecting startups, investors, and policy makers under one roof in Astana.
03:52Over 20,000 innovators, investors, and startups gathered in Astana for the three-day Digital Bridge Forum, Central Asia's largest tech event.
04:01Startups secured tens of thousands of euros in funding as Kazakhstan showcased its growing digital and AI ambitions.
04:08Our goal was to create a collaborative environment, where education, business, companies, big tech companies, ventures.
04:19Among the startups driving this new wave is Neurobox, a compact supercomputer that can replace entire departments in finance and government with its multimodal AI agents.
04:29Running fully offline, it performs 180 trillion operations per second, building AI models without cloud access.
04:38In the closed corners, there are a few neurons, without referring to the Internet.
04:41So, you can scan your data base, your documents, your Excel tablets, all your financial indicators, from which, then, by the request, you can pull out your documents and analytics.
04:52Or do that or do that.
04:53At this year's forum, President Tokayev announced plans to turn digital bridge into an AI bridge, linking Kazakhstan's technological ambitions with the global AI future.
05:05By 2029, Kazakhstan wants to see 100 new startups every year and raise AI exports to more than 4 billion euros.
05:13Here to assess the effectiveness of the country's AI strategy is a venture investor, Marat Tolubay, CEO of Aktivat Venture Capital.
05:23Mr. Tolubay, welcome.
05:25So, my first question is, what would convince investors watching us today to take a closer look at Kazakhstan's AI ecosystem?
05:32The venture market in general, all our region, Central Asia and Kavkaz, in the past few years, is a very big time and Kazakhstan is the leader in this market.
05:43For example, in 2024, in the start-up in all the region, it was invested in more than 100 million dollars.
05:50And of them, 70 million dollars were invested in Kazakhstan, in Kazakhstan, in the start-up.
05:55Now, we have around 20-25 specialized funds, companies, which are only in start-ups.
06:04There are constantly around 1,5 thousand start-ups.
06:07This market is developing very powerful times.
06:10Kazakhstan's startup Hicksfield became the first leader.
06:13He received more than 1 billion dollars in the US.
06:16But there are a number of other kazakhs-tops, who came to the international market.
06:21Do Kazakh startups attract any international co-investors, or are they still largely dependent on domestic capital?
06:29We have a standard scheme, that startup, who showed good results on the local market,
06:34he gets investment from kazakhs-tops and goes on the international market.
06:39But we have already a number of startups, who have already received investment from foreign investors.
06:46The same Hicksfield, Leaping AI, Alma, are startups, who have already received investment from American investors.
06:54And here, from our portfolio, startup Garderob, he received investment from the European fund.
07:02The main advantage of the kazakhs-tops in the start-ups in the US, is that the kazakhs-tops in the US are now very low-to-income.
07:12At the same time, the kazakhs-tops in the pre-seed, the kazakhs-tops in the US$ 1,2 million dollars in the US,
07:19and they are around 200-300 thousand dollars.
07:22At the same time, the European, for example, are 5 or more million dollars,
07:27the American, for example, 7-8 million dollars.
07:30And, of course, they raise 500 thousand dollars, a million dollars, and so on.
07:34We, in Kazakhstan, are very talented people, who can make exactly the same startups,
07:41but they are cheaper, and now it is useful to invest in them,
07:46until they became a kind of people.
07:49Thank you so much for your insights.
07:50Thank you.
07:52That's all for now.
07:54See you in the next episode of East West Connect.
07:57Oh, my God.
07:59If своей star was all over, byем there was wonderful heroes.
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