AIBRIEF
Kazakhtelecom will run the Ekibastuz site as part of a domestic compute push, after Firebird opened an Armenia campus.
Firebird, a US-based AI infrastructure company, has received US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) export authorization to build a 125 MW AI data center in Ekibastuz, a city in northeastern Kazakhstan, with national operator Kazakhtelecom running the site. The partners call the project Data Center Valley.
The clearance is what turns an announced plan into a buildable project: it lets Firebird ship the underlying GPU hardware into Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of AI and Digital Development Zhaslan Madiyev framed the deal as domestic capacity rather than reliance on foreign infrastructure, citing the country's existing energy base, territory, and digital ecosystem as the pitch to Firebird.
Ekibastuz is Firebird's second market. The first, a campus in Hrazdan, Armenia, opened on August 8 with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in attendance. Firebird describes the Hrazdan facility as the region's largest operational AI factory built on NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture, a pre-validated layout for liquid-cooled GPU clusters. Firebird plans to scale the Armenian site to more than 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 MW by the end of 2027. The 125 MW Ekibastuz figure is a stated initial target, not delivered megawatts, and the specific scope of the BIS license has not been disclosed.