On October 23, 2026, Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, visited Kazakhstan and participated in a fireside chat with Zhaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, at the Alem.ai International Artificial Intelligence Center in Astana. During the discussion, Huang highlighted the importance of national data for AI development and praised Kazakhstan’s progress in developing its own large language model.
“I am very glad to see that Kazakhstan already has its own large language model — Kazakh LLM, which enables the collection, processing, and use of national data to create its own artificial intelligence,” Huang said.
Huang’s remarks highlighted an important aspect of sovereign AI development: the ability of countries to build AI technologies around their own languages, data, and cultural context. National language models can help address the underrepresentation of local languages in global AI systems and support the development of technologies adapted to the needs of individual societies.
In Kazakhstan, the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at Nazarbayev University contributes to this effort through the development of ISSAI KAZ-LLM, a large language model designed for Kazakhstan’s multilingual environment. The model supports Kazakh, Russian, and English, with additional support for Turkish, and was released as an open-source model for non-commercial use in December 2024.
The development of ISSAI KAZ-LLM involved collecting, curating, synthesizing, and translating more than 150 billion tokens of training data. The project enabled the ISSAI research team to develop expertise across the full model development process, from dataset preparation to training and evaluation, while contributing to the advancement of generative AI for the Kazakh language.
The Institute’s work reflects its broader commitment to developing sovereign generative AI technologies that address Kazakhstan’s linguistic and technological needs while contributing to international scientific research. Through locally developed models and open research, ISSAI aims to strengthen Kazakhstan’s AI capabilities and support the development of technologies that better represent the languages and communities they serve.
Huang’s visit brought international attention to Kazakhstan’s growing AI ecosystem and the importance of combining global technological advances with local research expertise to develop AI systems with national relevance and global potential.