A data center is a 20-year commitment to a piece of ground. Before the first foundation was poured for Akashi, the site itself had to earn its place — and the question we were asked most often was simply: why Astana?
The short answer: the things that make a data center cheap, reliable and durable to operate are unusually well aligned in Kazakhstan’s capital. Here is the longer one.
A climate that does the cooling for you
Cooling is the single largest ongoing energy cost in most data centers. Astana sits in a cold continental climate, which means the outside air is, for much of the year, cold enough to cool servers directly — “free cooling” — with little or no mechanical refrigeration.
Akashi’s facility is engineered around that advantage. Free and hybrid cooling modes are designed to cut cooling energy by up to 40% compared with a refrigeration-only design, while the plant is still rated to hold its service level on the rare days the thermometer reaches 42 °C. Lower cooling energy is not only a cost saving — it is a smaller carbon footprint per rack, which is increasingly part of enterprise procurement criteria.
Power that pencils out
The second-largest number on a data center’s operating sheet is electricity itself. Kazakhstan has some of the lowest industrial power prices in the region — on the order of $0.08 per kWh — and Astana’s grid gave Akashi room to connect at scale.
The campus is fed by two independent 110 kV power lines with a dedicated substation, sized for the full build-out toward 100 MW of IT capacity across four data center buildings. Redundant, owned power infrastructure at a low unit price is the foundation everything else is built on.
Connectivity: four ways in and out
A data center is only as useful as the networks reaching it. Astana sits on the East–West digital backbone that links Europe and Asia, and Akashi connects to it through four independent optical entries.
Four physically separate routes mean no single cable cut can isolate the facility — and it puts major Central Asian markets within roughly 10 ms of round-trip latency. For workloads serving the region, that combination of route diversity and low latency is hard to reproduce elsewhere.
Data sovereignty, on home soil
Kazakhstan, like a growing number of countries, has data-localization rules that require certain categories of data — personal data in particular — to be stored on servers inside the country. For Kazakh businesses, government bodies and international companies serving Kazakh customers, that turns “where is my data physically located?” into a compliance question, not just a technical one.
A Tier IV facility inside Kazakhstan answers it directly: data stays on home soil, under Kazakh jurisdiction, without giving up the reliability standard of a top-tier international data center.
Built into an industrial cluster
Finally, a site is more than its coordinates. Akashi’s 11-hectare campus sits within an established industrial zone in Astana, with the access roads, utilities and skilled workforce that a 24/7 critical facility depends on. Building inside a cluster — rather than on a greenfield site far from infrastructure — shortened the construction path and gives the facility a deeper operational talent pool to draw on.
In short
No single factor decides a data center site. Astana won because several independent ones — a cooling climate, cheap and redundant power, diverse fibre, a data-sovereignty mandate and a ready industrial cluster — happened to line up in the same place. That alignment is why Central Asia’s first Tier IV data center is being built where it is.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Kazakhstan a good location for a data center?
Kazakhstan combines a cold climate that enables free cooling, among the lowest industrial electricity prices in the region (~$0.08/kWh), and a position on the East–West fibre backbone between Europe and Asia. Data-localization law also creates domestic demand for in-country hosting.
What is Akashi Data Center?
Akashi is Central Asia’s first Tier IV data center, under construction in Astana, Kazakhstan — an 11-hectare campus with four data center buildings, 4,224 racks and 100 MW of IT capacity, with first-phase launch planned for 2027.
How does Astana’s climate reduce data center costs?
Astana’s cold continental climate lets the facility cool servers with outside air for much of the year. Akashi’s free and hybrid cooling design targets up to a 40% reduction in cooling energy versus a refrigeration-only approach.
Does hosting in Kazakhstan help with data-sovereignty requirements?
Yes. Kazakhstan’s data-localization rules require certain data to be stored on servers within the country. Hosting in a Kazakh Tier IV facility keeps data under domestic jurisdiction while meeting an international reliability standard.