Uzbekistan Builds First Regional Green Data Center TAS-1: 12 MW with AI Readiness by December

The site is positioned as one of the first “green” data centers in Central Asia. The capacities will be open to the entire market: private corporations, government agencies, and tech startups will be able to rent server racks.

Technical features: Why AI specifically

The starting capacity of TAS-1 will be 12 megawatts. The main difference between the new site and standard commercial data centers in the region lies in the architecture of its cooling systems.

Conventional data centers are designed for classic servers. However, training neural networks, deploying large language models, and streaming data analytics require clusters of graphics processing units (GPUs). Such equipment consumes more energy and generates a critical amount of heat that traditional industrial air conditioners cannot handle.

To solve this engineering challenge, the TAS-1 server rooms will be equipped with a liquid cooling system. The technology allows heat to be removed directly from the computing chips, enabling more equipment to be placed in a smaller area without the risk of overheating.

Typically, a data center’s declared “green” status implies increased energy efficiency, which becomes an important factor for large tech companies when choosing a location.

The economics of IT exports: From outsourcing to complex products

For Uzbekistan, building infrastructure of this class is a direct instrument of state economic policy. The country has already increased its IT service exports from $1 million to nearly $1 billion. This growth was primarily driven by basic business process outsourcing (BPO).

The government’s next goal is to reach the $5 billion mark by 2030. Scaling exports solely through billable hours is becoming more difficult. The market needs to transition to creating its own products: SaaS platforms, fintech solutions, and AI services.

Developing such products requires a local computing base. If servers are located abroad, working with heavy data arrays runs into physical signal delay (latency). Furthermore, local infrastructure simplifies handling sensitive information for the financial and government sectors, which in most jurisdictions are required to store data domestically.

Anchor clients and ecosystem

The demand for high-performance capacities within Uzbekistan has already been established. The telecom operator Beeline became the first anchor tenant of TAS-1, having booked space in advance for its operations.

Telecommunications companies traditionally generate massive amounts of data and actively build digital ecosystems. Finteqstan previously noted the development of local payment services, such as Beeline Pay; for the uninterrupted operation of such fintech products and real-time processing, reliable infrastructure with minimal ping is critically important.

The availability of rentals at TAS-1 will also lower the barrier to entry for local startups. They will no longer have to purchase expensive physical servers or overpay for foreign cloud hosting to test hypotheses related to machine learning.

Why it matters and what’s next

The availability of liquid-cooled infrastructure shifts the IT sector from selling basic outsourcing to the ability to create and export resource-intensive computing solutions.

The current 12 MW is only the first phase of the project. In the coming years, investors plan to scale the site and bring the data center’s total capacity to 500 MW. The speed of this expansion will depend on how quickly the first halls fill up after the December launch.