Kazakhtelecom CEO estimates Kazakhstan data centers' electricity demand at 5 GW

The head of Kazakhtelecom, Bagdat Mussin, gave the estimate at the AI&Digital Bridge forum, reports Kursiv.media. For comparison: the design capacity of the "data center valley" in Ekibastuz is 1 GW.

The gist in brief

• Kazakhtelecom Chairman of the Board Bagdat Mussin estimated the combined demand of Kazakhstan's operating and planned data centers at 5 GW of electricity; the "data center valley" project in Ekibastuz is designed for 1 GW.
• According to him, electricity generated from coal from the Ekibastuz basin costs about 2.5 cents per kWh (11.05 tenge at the National Bank exchange rate); he called this cost one of the lowest in the world.
• Mussin expects that starting next year Kazakhstan will begin exporting computing capacity, and in the energy production plan, by his estimate, more than 5 GW of additional energy is earmarked that could be directed to computing.
• He called international connectivity, including the fiber-optic line along the bottom of the Caspian Sea, more important for data centers than the low cost of electricity.

Where the 5 GW came from and what it means for the country

Mussin was talking about demand for the entire country, not just Ekibastuz.

"Our entire territory could become one big 'data center valley,'" he said.

At the same time, he stipulated that the problem of electricity production must first be addressed, but, by his estimate, the generation development plan includes more than 5 GW of additional energy that could be used for computing.

To grasp the scale, a simple calculation is enough. 5 GW operating around the clock at full load is about 43.8 billion kWh per year, or roughly 35% of Kazakhstan's total electricity consumption in 2025 (124.6 billion kWh). Actual utilization will be lower, so this is an upper bound, but the order of magnitude is telling. This is our arithmetic, not Mussin's estimate.

Against this backdrop, the current balance also matters. An August piece on the "data center valley" cited data: in 2025 the country produced 123.1 billion kWh while consuming 124.6 billion, with the deficit covered by imports from Russia, which the authorities promise to abandon in 2027. The first phase of the project, 300 MW, by our calculations, exceeds the country's entire current deficit when converted to continuous load.

2.5 cents: which tariff is being discussed

In Kursiv's retelling, 2.5 cents looks like the cost of coal-fired electricity in the republic in general. In the August piece, the same figure was treated differently: as the level of a tariff being worked out for investors through a separate tariff circuit, roughly half the current industrial rate. At the time, the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of AI and Digital Development gave different versions of how electricity would physically be supplied to data centers, and the Ministry of Energy redirected the question of compensating the tariff difference to the authorized body.

Perhaps these are different indicators: the cost of coal-fired generation and the tariff for data centers. But this is not clear from the publication, and it is one of the key questions for calculating the project's economics.

Export of computing and connectivity

Mussin hopes that starting next year Kazakhstan will begin exporting computing capacity, that is, "tokens." He speaks of this as a hope, not a schedule. This is consistent with the timeline for launching the valley's first facilities (2027), but their capacity is far less than 5 GW.

He also believes that the fiber-optic line along the bottom of the Caspian and other channels will reduce Kazakhstan's lag behind competing economies. The prioritization is also interesting: international connectivity, he says, is more important than cheap electricity. Separately, Mussin mentioned a possible link between ground-based computing capacity and the space industry and said that the Ministry of AI is working in this area and developing regulatory frameworks. The publication does not provide details. In his view, the companies that enter the country first will earn the greatest profit.

Advice to startups: extraction and agriculture

Mussin advised Kazakh startups to develop technologies and services that improve the efficiency of oil, gas, and metals extraction, which bring the largest share of foreign exchange earnings, as well as the operation of agriculture and other sectors. As an example, he cited Higgsfield AI, which reached a valuation of over $1 billion, noting that such companies appear once every ten years, while the country needs thousands of startups improving ordinary production businesses and services.

For the agricultural sector, this echoes the Ministry of Agriculture's plan to unite the agro-industrial complex's digital systems into a single platform by the end of 2028: the more such systems there are, the greater the demand for solutions that work on top of them.

What the statement does not contain

Mussin heads a company that is building the "valley" (the project operator is KT-Telecom, half of which Kazakhtelecom sold to Samruk-Kazyna Invest), so the 5 GW demand estimate is an estimate from an interested party. The publication provides no breakdown: which data centers and at which sites are included in this figure, by what deadlines and through what generation it will be provided. There is also no independent demand assessment, nor data on how the plans for the additional 5 GW relate to the overall generation commissioning program and to the wear and tear of existing stations.

Nor is it said how growth beyond 1 GW will be financed. Even for the valley itself, Mussin in September spoke of sums measured in more than one billion dollars, with sources being AIFC bonds, DBK funds, and international institutions.

Author's conclusion

Mussin's statement is more a benchmark of ambitions than a forecast: 5 GW for data centers would mean a load comparable to a noticeable share of the country's entire current consumption, while the key parameters, from the tariff to the source of generation, have not yet been disclosed. The most interesting part of the speech is the admission that international connectivity is more important than cheap electricity: it shows what the head of Kazakhtelecom is betting on first and foremost. The test will not be demand estimates, but the first launched facilities of the "valley" and the actual price of electricity for them.