Kazakhstan generated 91.7 billion kWh in nine months, up 2 per cent

Kazakhstan generated 91.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2026, 2 per cent more than a year earlier, the deputy energy minister, Yerlan Akbarov, told a government meeting on 13 October, a government release said.

Kazakhstan expects 126.5 billion kWh for the full year, Akbarov told the meeting. The same release says the country plans to add about 2.4 GW of conventional capacity this year to reduce what it describes as an electricity deficit. That is the power system into which Kazakhstan wants to place a new generation of data centres.

The government's stated target is 10 data centres of at least Tier III standard by 2030, with a combined capacity of around 20,000 IT racks, it said in a July 2025 statement. Set against the national power balance, the question for investors is less whether the electricity exists in aggregate than where, when and at what price it can be connected.

The power balance in the official record

Method: the first six rows come from the Kazakh government's release of 13 October 2026 on the energy sector's nine-month results, published in Russian and translated by Corridor Signal. The last two rows come from the government's English-language statement of 4 July 2025. The data-centre load scenarios in the text are Corridor Signal calculations from stated assumptions, not official figures.

What a data-centre build would add

The rack target does not translate directly into megawatts, because the government does not state a power density. As an illustration, 20,000 racks at 10 kW each would be 200 MW of IT load. At a power usage effectiveness of 1.4, that would draw about 2.45 billion kWh a year, or roughly 1.9 per cent of the 2026 generation forecast, on a Corridor Signal calculation. At 20 kW a rack the draw would double to about 4.9 billion kWh, or roughly 3.9 per cent. Either figure is small against national output, but not against the year's additions: the 7.8 billion kWh produced by renewables in nine months, or the 212.6 MW of renewable capacity commissioned so far this year, the release says.

Scale was also visible in earlier plans. In June 2024 a government release said Freedom Telecom had proposed building a data centre of at least Tier III for storing transit and international traffic, with its own investment of more than KZT 90 billion and completion by the end of 2027. That project is one of the 10 sites the 2030 target counts on, if it proceeds on that timetable.

Where the constraint sits

The release describes a system that is still adding capacity to catch up with demand. The 2.4 GW of conventional additions planned for 2026 include the modernisation of Almaty's CHP-2 and CHP-3 plants, a combined-cycle plant in Turkestan region and a new turbine and boiler at the Atyrau CHP; by mid-October a 240 MW combined-cycle plant in Kyzylorda region and 17 MW at the Tekeli energy complex were in service, the government said. The longer programme aims to add more than 26 GW of generation by 2035, the energy minister said in a government statement in July 2025, with projects totalling 10 GW already at various stages, a further 5 GW to come from modernising existing plants and 621.5 MW planned for commissioning in 2025. The October release adds that two more solar plants totalling 30 MW and a 3.2 MW hydro plant are due before the end of 2026.

For a data-centre developer, three things follow from the official numbers. First, a few hundred megawatts of IT load is a manageable share of national output but a large single connection, so location relative to new plants and the transmission grid will decide timelines. Second, renewable output is growing faster than the total, up 21 per cent in nine months, which matters to cloud customers with emissions targets but supplies only about 8.5 per cent of generation so far this year, a Corridor Signal calculation from the release. Third, the government itself uses the word deficit, which suggests new large loads will compete with industrial and household demand for the capacity coming on line.

The documents reviewed do not give a regulated tariff for data centres, a connection queue or the megawatts already contracted by data-centre projects. Those are the figures that would turn the national balance into a site-level business case, and the next disclosures to watch from the energy ministry and the grid operator.