DataCenterDynamics, the data center industry’s specialist publication, has run a piece on the market shifting toward Central Asia. The Akashi Data Center project features in it as a case in point for the region’s rising weight.

Capacity has run out in the established hubs

The article draws on Jones Lang LaSalle’s H1 2026 report: grid connection timelines for new data centers across FLAPD — Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin — are now sliding past 2030.

The consequence shows up in the price of powered land. Against 2021 it has climbed 82%, reaching €2.26 million per megawatt.

The shortage is visible in occupancy too. In Frankfurt the vacancy rate fell to 4.6% by the end of Q2 2026, the lowest in FLAPD. The market has effectively moved to a pre-leasing model: according to CBRE, roughly 77% of capacity brought online since the start of 2026 had been contracted in advance, before commissioning — ten percentage points more than a year earlier.

Demand is spilling beyond the big five: European secondary and tertiary cities accounted for a record 55% of new leasing take-up — Groningen, Brussels, Barcelona, Norway. What draws operators there is accessible, relatively cheap power.

Where the market is moving

Until recently, the article notes, the Middle East looked like the leading alternative on the strength of its energy reserves — but amid the current conflict many projects there have been put on hold.

Central Asia is named as the next alternative, and Kazakhstan first of all: the region’s largest economy, with substantial energy resources. Over the past two years the country has adopted the Concept for the Development of Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Qazaqstan strategy and the Digital Code.

The infrastructure layer gets its own mention: a trans-Caspian fiber-optic line with capacity of up to 400 Tbit/s, linking Kazakhstan’s infrastructure to Azerbaijan’s networks and onward to European markets, and the privately backed West–East hyper-highway extending that corridor toward China.

Akashi’s role

A cable between Europe and Asia settles nothing on its own: an international cloud provider needs a reliable landing point where the data flow can be processed with minimal latency. The article assigns that role to Akashi Data Center, under construction in Astana — a declared capacity of 100 MW and Tier IV status following the Uptime Institute’s review of its design documentation.

It quotes Akashi’s chairman of the board, Vladislav Minkevich: the site’s key advantage is not a single guaranteed latency figure but the presence of multiple independent carriers, multiple diverse and redundant fiber entry points, and access to alternative international routes. That combination lets cloud operators and hyperscalers tune latency, network resilience and routing to their own requirements.

In his words, Tier IV-grade infrastructure together with access to large-scale power and diversified international connectivity creates the conditions to serve Central Asian users from infrastructure inside the region — without routing traffic through distant hubs such as Frankfurt or Singapore.

Full text: Central Asia as a new territory for digital infrastructure — DataCenterDynamics, 1 September 2026.