Freedom Holding Corp. and Kazakhstan’s Digital Leap

Today, the most advanced technologies are increasingly being created not only in Silicon Valley, London, or Tokyo. Emerging markets are becoming their new testing grounds, places where businesses are ready to invest in real solutions and governments are interested in rapid experimentation. What may take years of regulatory approvals in Europe, the United States, or Japan can turn into a working product much faster in Central Asia.

A major technology hub is emerging in Central Asia, a region increasingly positioned between China and Europe not only as a transit corridor, but as a place where digital infrastructure can be built and tested at speed. Projects here are being developed in partnership with global technology leaders such as NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, and China Mobile International. A data center designed to meet the highest Tier IV standard is being built, while drone delivery is already being tested in city streets.

This is Kazakhstan, where a flexible regulatory environment, a young market, and the growing maturity of local business are creating conditions for technologies to be deployed as working services. One of the private-sector companies already helping to shape this landscape is Freedom Holding Corp., an international company whose shares are traded on Nasdaq under the ticker FRHC. Taken together, these projects show how Freedom is trying to turn Kazakhstan into a launchpad for an integrated digital ecosystem that combines finance, telecom, cloud infrastructure, AI, and logistics.

Freedom’s main strategic focus today is infrastructure. In November 2025, the holding company announced that it had reached an agreement with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development to create a sovereign AI hub valued at $2 billion. The project will operate on NVIDIA infrastructure, and the site is designed for 100 MW of available power capacity; Freedom will serve as the main financial and operational partner. For Kazakhstan, this means the emergence of a computing base on which large AI models can be trained and hosted domestically, without moving critical data outside national jurisdiction.

Another pillar of this strategy is data centers and cloud services. Freedom Cloud is developing local cloud infrastructure and has signed a partnership agreement with Amazon Web Services. As a result, Kazakhstani startups gain access to AWS Activate, AWS Marketplace, and international certifications, while Freedom Cloud itself is developing IaaS and PaaS solutions, high-load computing, object storage, and AI cloud tools for businesses and government agencies. Another major project is the Akashi data center in Astana. Akashi is being built in partnership with China Mobile International and is expected to become Kazakhstan’s first data center designed to meet the Tier IV standard.

The technological shift is not limited to large infrastructure. Freedom Lifestyle Group, a division of Freedom Holding Corp., has already launched drone-based delivery services in Almaty. According to Forbes Kazakhstan, the first flights began in January 2026. The company expects drones, and later robotic dogs, to become part of last-mile delivery, first for groceries and flowers, and later for a broader range of urban services. At the same time, Freedom’s unmanned logistics are not limited to the capital city Almaty: the company is also considering scenarios for delivering goods in rural regions of Kazakhstan, where such solutions may be especially in demand in remote villages because of long distances, the high cost of traditional logistics, and weak transport connectivity. This is a real-world test of whether AI and autonomous control can reduce logistics costs.

Kazakhstan’s model is distinctive because the state does not merely declare digitalization; it allows new technologies to be tested both in cities and in less densely populated regions. On June 10, 2026, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev approved a nationwide strategy for digital transformation and AI adoption, designed to move the country toward a “full-fledged digital state” model within three years and introduce AI into key sectors of the economy and government administration. For international observers, the more important point is not the strategy itself, but the environment it reflects: a market where regulation, business demand, and infrastructure investment are moving in the same direction.

For Freedom Holding Corp., these experiments are part of a broader ecosystem concept. Timur Turlov, founder and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., writes in a column for OnInvest that the digital economy creates ecosystems rather than industrial conglomerates, and that the export of knowledge and technology is becoming one of the most valuable forms of export beyond natural resources. Within this framework, Kazakhstan can compete through digital products and services: financial services, cloud infrastructure, AI solutions, and telecom platforms. For a country with a strong engineering tradition, a young market, and flexible regulation, this could become a strategic advantage.

Another element of this technological leap is the joint laboratory of Freedom Telecom and Nokia in Silicon Valley. It opened on Nokia’s campus in Sunnyvale and will focus on telecommunications, cloud platforms, and AI. The laboratory plans to test voice and chat assistants, agentic AI systems, products for the Freedom SuperApp, and solutions for next-generation data centers. For Kazakhstan, this represents an important model of technological partnership: the country is not merely importing off-the-shelf solutions but gaining access to early-stage technology testing together with one of the world’s largest telecom infrastructure players.

Freedom Holding Corp. is already testing whether its model can be exported beyond Kazakhstan. One of the first cases is Tajikistan. In October 2024, Freedom Bank received a banking license in Tajikistan and subsequently began developing a fully digital bank. The next target markets are Turkey and Europe. Freedom is already developing its Turkish business and, according to Timur Turlov’s official website, has applied for a banking license in France, with plans to invest €500 million in creating a digital bank and developing an ecosystem in Europe. The logic is the same: if banking, brokerage, insurance, lifestyle, and telecom services work in Kazakhstan as a unified digital environment, they can be scaled to markets where users often rely on fragmented digital services and a slower customer experience.

The holding company’s financial results provide the resources for this expansion. For the 2026 fiscal year, which ended on March 31, 2026, Freedom Holding Corp. generated $2.191 billion in revenue, compared with $2.004 billion a year earlier, while net income rose from $76.2 million to $153.3 million. The banking customer base nearly doubled – from 2.52 million to 5.03 million customers – and the number of brokerage accounts increased from 683,000 to 858,000. An important signal is the 143% growth in revenue from goods and services, to $97.4 million: the company links this to its telecom business, Arbuz.kz, e-commerce, and the expansion of non-financial services.

Timur Turlov has described telecom as the group’s fourth major source of revenue. In June 2026, he said that once its data centers are completed, this segment could generate “several billion dollars in revenue” in the coming years. According to him, the company already has offtake contracts – agreements with customers to purchase future capacity – that will provide tens of millions of dollars in revenue from the new facilities’ first year of operation. The same report said that Freedom had built 220 5G base stations, that network speeds reach 1 Gbit/s, and that 35,000 customers use the division’s digital services.