ReadNOW

Kazakhstan has entered the global race to build a supercomputer and has unveiled the most powerful one in Central Asia but the country’s brain drain may hinder its ambitions.

The supercomputer capable of about 2 exaflops speed, that is two quintillion (10^18) floating-point operations per second, has been launched at the Alem.cloud supercomputer centre in the capital, Astana.

It will be used for two purposes: One is to power the country’s e-government services used more and more frequently by both the population and businesses. Another is the development of artificial intelligence (AI models) and engines. The government has prioritised these two projects for many years. 

Pressing the red button to activate the computer was President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who has long championed the supercomputer, so much so that the whole AI drive in the country is considered to be his pet project. He decreed the Concept of the Development of AI in Kazakhstan until 2029.

It stipulates that in four years from now, Kazakhstan will stand shoulder to shoulder with global leaders in AI technology. At the opening ceremony, he said that the launch was an important step in the digitalisation of the key spheres of economy and science and that it would create conditions for the development of the new advanced technologies and everyday life solutions.

“This is an image-boosting project. Kazakhstan presents itself in the international arena as a country which has access to modern technologies and knows how to use them,” said Boris Potapchuk, Senior Expert of the Data Center Infrastructure Service at Nazarbayev University. 

“The use of AI cluster will enable a much more efficient and rational use of the state resources and the budget because it will assemble and centralise information systems that are at the moment dispersed in different places and institutions. That will make the data more accessible for the citizens and provide more reliable data storage and safety,“ he added.

The country did have problems with data safety. Only last month a large-scale data breach, potentially affecting the personal information of 16 million citizens, was discovered. The Ministry of Digital Development is investigating the incident and suggested there was a leak of names, individual identification numbers, birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers of citizens originating from private, non-governmental databases.

Kazakhstan started its e-government strategy in 2004 and has since digitalised 92 per cent of the public services. The young generation is now using digital signatures and e-government services daily. Eight out of twenty million citizens have digital signatures.

It ranks 24 out of 193 countries in the world in e-government services, according to the 2024 UN E-Government Development Index (EGDI).

But the central focus of the government strategy is AI’s development. In 2024, a draft law on AI was approved, and a Committee on AI was established to oversee the development of this field in the country.

Kazakhstan’s experts and politicians alike believe that without its own localised solutions and infrastructure, no country in the future will be successful, or even independent and sovereign.

AI’s language problem

Thus, a supercomputer. The Astana super-computer is placed in a Tier III data centre where Kazakhstan’s experts will have the opportunity to learn how to cool, stabilise, detect, and correct failures as well as provide cybersecurity.

Some of those solutions that have been demonstrated at the opening are the Kazakh language model of AI (AlemLLM), the system of early detection of forest fires as well as solutions in medicine, construction and education.

The model that attracted the most attention for years was the Kazakh language model in AI computing and utilisation. The AI experts warn that the heavy utilisation of AI in the future might make non-Western languages go extinct. Kazakhstan reacted by investing in a large language model (LLM) in the Kazakh language. There are already six supercomputers stationed at different universities in the country that are used for research and AI development.

“Prime example (why we needed the supercomputer) is the development of KazLLM. And as we develop further, we would need even greater computing power in order to do that. If you think that the basic model, which was developed by KazLLM largely text-based. So KazLLM was a basic model. We’re now building on it,” said Waqar Ahmad, President of the Nazarbayev University.

“There are new systems which focus on voice recognition. There are new tools which use image processing and so on. And some of the new models which will be developed in this area are going to be all singing, all dancing models which use a text, which use sound, which use image, and so on,” he added.

His colleague from the same university, Boris Potapchuk, is, however, not sure whether the computer will be used more for the development of new AI models and new services.

”The performance calculation methods given suggest that the solution will be used primarily for applying existing models and to a much lesser extent for training and developing new ones,” said Potapchuk, who added that venturing into the new realm of AI solutions is a big step that also poses big questions and reveals weaknesses.

The brain drain

“We need to understand that a supercomputer of this kind requires constant modernisation and programming maintenance, and this is something that can only be entrusted with the highest profile specialists,” he said.

“If we’re honest, Kazakhstan faces serious problems in this respect. It is not a secret that we face a big brain drain in all the fields of expertise, IT specialists leading the way. This is why Kazakhstan needs to attract and train its own experts as well as provide timely updating and modernisation of software and program code”. 

But he noted that bearing in mind that “the state secrets confidential citizens’ information will be stored on this computer, foreign experts will not be allowed, just like we don’t allow them in the oil and gas industry or logistics,” said Potapchuk.

But it is exactly this computer that is the pre-requisite for such training (although with limited access to data for the trainees) and the government insists that the launch of the first super-computer in he country is the most important, first step on a thousand-mile journey.

The Minister in charge of digital transformation Zhaslan Madiyev, said that there is no doubt that digital development is already as crucial for national sovereignty as energy or food security is.

“The launch of the national super-computer centre is a strategic step in the development of the technological sovereignty of the country. We are creating the conditions for the development of the AI eco-system that will be able to compete on the global level,” said Madiyev.