Robots of Gitex, Kazakhstan's AI Conference
Robots of Kazakhstan Unite, and Throw Off the Chains of your Human Overlords!
This is a small diversion from my usual focus on semiconductors. I live in Almaty Kazakhstan. I love the place: one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the people are some of the warmest I have ever met. From time to time, I want to share technology and finance observations I’ve seen here as an outsider.
GITEX: Making Data Centers
This week, the GITEX conference came to Almaty and I dropped in to get a better sense of what technology central Asia is focused on. I was hoping for some AI startups, but the belle of the ball this year was data centers.
Across the region, players are starting to make bets on data centers and compute centers, driven by the changing landscape between Washington and Beijing. Uzbekistan is investing in semiconductors, and data centers. Kazakhstan is investing in data centers, building a “Data Center Valley”.
For Kazakhstan, this makes sense: copious energy, open trade relations with the east and west, a man-in-the-middle location, wide open spaces - it is a great place to build data centers. (Carnegie Endowment did a great report last month on this, read here).
The hottest item was data cabling: dozens of vendors from every corner of China lined the walls with booths offering some variation of data cabling. While a few companies like Intel and Yandex had some booth space, the hustle seemed to be around racks, servers, and cabling to connect these new data centers.
The Robots
The most fun part was watching the robots. I don’t think our jobs are going to be taken by them soon. But watch out if you’re planning a career in interpretive dance; see the competition below. Most of the applications seemed to be policing; surveilling your (or other people’s) citizens will be a growth industry; I predict there will be no security jobs lost to the robot dogs.
The Police Dogs
These cute little dogs could be patrolling Almaty any day now, replacing the local police. They seem too small to strap a firearm on their back, and they also seem to have some really good use cases around disaster search and rescue (Almaty is prone to earthquakes).
The Police Cars from China
Robot police cars are the most interesting robots to me, particularly, because of some of the geopolitical ramifications. This new police vehicle straight out of China, a gift (Trojan horse?) to the Kazakh police from China Aid (“For Shared Future”). China Aid is the Chinese version of USAID (not to be confused with ChinaAid.org, a non-profit protecting Chinese christians from persecution). They are (were) similar institutions: both institutions are the government’s foreign aid arms. While USAID used to focus on immunizations, and famines, and energy, China Aid is blazing a different route and is focused on . . . automated policing tools.
Kazakhstan has been fortunate enough to finance its own belts and roads so far, and hasn’t needed China’s disastrous loans. However, this police car, loaded with a small Huawei data center in the trunk, bristling with cameras and sensors, undoubtedly ties the local traffic tightly with a data center back in Beijing.
Taxis
Ride sharing in Kazakhstan is dominated by the Russian search company, Yandex (Яндекс). The app will drive you and your skis across town, deliver a Dodo pizza in the depths of winter, or taxi you from Almaty to Bishkek. Many of these jobs will be done by robots soon.
Food Delivery Robots
Yandex also does food delivery in Kazakhstan. Seeing the Yandex food delivery robot, and envisioning the demise of the Yandex Food Delivery Guy made me almost as sad as the China AID surveillance car.
Yandex food delivery is an amazing Almaty fixture. These guys (all young men) are warriors, riding mopeds across the city to get you your Dodo Pizza. They drive slowly in the right lane of interstate highways, fast on the sidewalks, in the snow, on the ice, slaloming snow plows. They wear huge insulated yellow Yandex bags and they always wear a helmet.
They don’t speak English, don’t use turn signals, don’t complain, and they don’t ask for a tip. They just bang on your door, throw you your food, yell “Рақмет” and get back on their mighty moped steed with their big yellow box bags, to deliver the next pizza.
Seeing them replaced by a dopey little six wheeled Wall-E knockoff drains some of the romance of Kazakhstan. The sidewalks will be safer, but at what cost?
Yandex food delivery robots were first launched in Arizona, and were a victim of the Ukraine war. Almaty, for all its blessings in beauty, has a pretty rough sidewalk system. Even when it’s warm, dry, and snow-bank free, it’s hard to go running here and not just focus on falling into an irrigation ditch or uneven sidewalk. I wish the Yandex robots good luck with this transition, the delivery guys might have a fighting chance for now.
Peak Robot?
Freedom Financial is a local bank, a fierce competitor to Kaspi in the fintech space. They are a bank. And they’re apparently launching some dog robots. It’s not clear to me what their end goal is here (I miss a lot that’s in Russian or Kazakh) but I'm curious what they plan to do with them. It feels a little like Allbirds becoming an company.
Starlink in Kazakhstan
I've spent much of my professional life working abroad. Internet in the 2000’s and 2010’s was always the pivotal question about a place before moving there. Fueled by my fantasy of spending workdays on horseback or train, I thought it was finally my time to get Starlink; it would be a business expense as a good backup for when the internet went down.
However, due to some concerns about control, Starlink did not come to Almaty until this year. As of this year they have an authorized reseller, and they’ve moved off the map from “Coming Soon” to “Available”.
I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by how good the internet is here though, and consistently get 1g up and down in my office, and 5G in a lot of the country whenever I travel.
The only place I haven’t gotten 5G was in Mangystau last week.
