Firebird Gets US Licence for 45,000 NVIDIA GPUs in Kazakhstan
Firebird's US licence covers NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs for Ekibastuz, but no delivery date is given; commercial launch targets Q3 2027 and total potential capacity is about 500 MW.
3 min readAI-assisted
Jensen Huang at a fireside chat in Astana during his 23 October visit to Kazakhstan. The photo shows the event, not the Ekibastuz site.
Image: NVIDIA
Source · Press image from the NVIDIA newsroom, used for news reporting.
Firebird, a US AI infrastructure company, has secured a US export licence for 45,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs for Kazakhstan, NVIDIA said in a blog post on the 23 October visit of its chief executive, Jensen Huang, to Astana.
The first phase is under construction with Kazakhtelecom at Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz, with commercial launch targeted for the third quarter of 2027, according to NVIDIA. A planned second phase would take Firebird's total potential AI infrastructure capacity in Kazakhstan to approximately 500 megawatts. The announcement coincided with Huang's first visit to the country, where Firebird signed an investment agreement with the Kazakh government at the presidential palace.
For the supply chain, the licence is the number to watch. It is a permit to ship, not evidence of delivered or operating hardware, and neither NVIDIA's post nor eeNews Europe's report gives a delivery schedule for the 45,000 GPUs. Firebird's first AI factory is in Armenia; Kazakhstan is an expansion beyond it.
Licensed, Deployed and Planned GPUs Are Separate Numbers
The figures describe different stages and should not be added together. Kazakhtelecom has already deployed 400 NVIDIA H200 and 480 NVIDIA B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty, NVIDIA said. Next year it plans more than 1,000 further GPUs at Data Center Valley and more than 1,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region.
The 45,000-GPU US export licence is a separate figure from the GPUs Kazakhtelecom has deployed and plans for 2027, according to NVIDIA.
Illustration (AI-generated)
The licence covers Grace Blackwell GPUs; the Vera Rubin GPUs are listed separately as a Kazakhtelecom plan. Vera Rubin is NVIDIA's next platform: Rubin GPUs, each with HBM4 high-bandwidth memory on the package, and Vera CPUs, built into 72-GPU rack-scale systems. The Ekibastuz plans would put that platform in the country alongside Grace Blackwell.
Kazakhstan's government had earlier announced agreements valued at $10 billion with Firebird and NVIDIA, including a cluster of up to 100,000 GPUs, eeNews Europe reported. It added that government construction updates in August confirmed work on an initial 50 MW facility, with a 215 MW electrical substation acquired and the first facility expected to operate in June 2027. That June 2027 date is the government's for first operation; NVIDIA's third-quarter 2027 date is a commercial launch target. The broader Data Center Valley development carries a longer-term target of 1 GW.
What Grace Blackwell Means in a Rack
Grace Blackwell is NVIDIA's pairing of its Arm-based Grace CPU with Blackwell-generation GPUs. In NVIDIA's GB300 NVL72, 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs share one liquid-cooled rack and one NVLink network, so the rack works as a single large machine; the GB200 NVL72 uses the same 72-and-36 layout.
A licence counted in GPUs becomes racks and megawatts only through system details that neither NVIDIA nor Firebird has given for the 45,000 units. For scale, NVIDIA's October 2026 datasheet lists its newer Vera Rubin NVL72 rack at 227 kW in its highest-power mode, a draw that decides how many racks a 50 MW or 500 MW site can hold.
Power Is the Constraint for Data Center Valley
Huang framed the project as a way to turn Kazakhstan's energy into computing, saying the country could "transform the energy into intelligence and export intelligence," according to The Astana Times. The 500 MW total potential capacity NVIDIA cites and the 1 GW Data Center Valley target are both plans, and both are well above the 50 MW facility under construction, eeNews Europe reported. eeNews Europe noted that the expansion will require substantial additional generating and distribution capacity.
NVIDIA also announced an investment in Higgsfield, a Kazakhstan-founded generative AI company, without disclosing the amount. Higgsfield plans to expand its compute with Vera Rubin through cloud service providers.
What NVIDIA and Firebird Have Not Confirmed
Neither NVIDIA's post nor eeNews Europe's report says when the 45,000 GPUs will ship or how many of them the first phase will hold. The 500 MW and 1 GW figures are plans, not installed capacity, and the commercial launch date of the third quarter of 2027 is a target. Firebird's first commercial operation will show how quickly the licence turns into running capacity.
