Uztelecom opens Bukhara and Kokand data centres on national cloud

Uztelecom commissioned data centres in Bukhara and Kokand on 22 September, the opening day of ICT Week Uzbekistan 2026, according to the Ministry of Digital Technologies. The sites were opened at Uztelecom's stand by Sherzod Shermatov, Minister of Digital Technologies, and Kenji Hirata, Japan's ambassador to Uzbekistan.

Both facilities operate within UzCloud, the national cloud platform. The ministry lists computing infrastructure (IaaS), platform solutions (PaaS), software (SaaS), S3 object storage and backup services (BaaS), with customers paying only for the resources they use. Trend reported that the sites also offer AI Cloud and GPU-as-a-Service, with dedicated GPU servers for model training, machine learning, image recognition, video analytics and digital twins.

The ministry said both projects have received Tier III Design certifications from the Uptime Institute, which it said confirm that the designs meet global standards for reliability and fault tolerance. Trend added that the sites have redundant power and cooling and extra communication channels so that maintenance can proceed without service interruptions. Neither account gives figures for power capacity, racks or GPU counts.

Distribution and connectivity

The new sites are more than 300 km from Tashkent, the furthest of Uztelecom's facilities from the capital, the ministry said. Trend reported that the distributed layout is intended to support disaster recovery, with workloads able to move between facilities if one site fails.

The data centres are connected to Uztelecom's backbone network and to TAS-IX, the national internet traffic exchange point, the ministry said. It added that Uztelecom's infrastructure is developed in compliance with ISO/IEC 27001 and that the company plans to certify its data centres against the PCI DSS standard, which remains a future step. The Internet Society's Pulse tracker, which draws on self-reported PeeringDB records, listed two active exchange points in Uzbekistan in October, SNS-IX with 18 members and UZ-IX with none, and estimated that 22 per cent of 108 active networks can exchange traffic through IXPs. TAS-IX is not among the exchange points it lists.

Umar Izbasarov, director of the department for advanced development and investment projects at Uztelecom, was quoted by the ministry as saying: "Our goal is to make advanced technologies accessible to companies of all sizes across all regions of the country."

Zangiata and the Japanese partners

The next phase is a data centre in the Zangiata district of the Tashkent region, which the ministry said is also Tier III certified, with commissioning set for autumn 2026. Trend described it as the fifth site in Uztelecom's distributed network and said Uztelecom reports more than 13 million users of its digital services.

At Zangiata, Uztelecom, Toyota Tsusho, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS and NEC will deploy the APN photonic network as part of the IOWN concept, the ministry said. Hideo Fuseda, Japan's Vice-Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, launched the Zangiata pilot project on 22 September, according to the same account.

Market context

The opening comes as Uzbekistan promotes itself as a regional data hub. The government says investment commitments for new data centres exceed $6 billion, and that a state-run Nvidia-based computing cluster reached 90 per cent utilisation in its first month, Euronews reported. The same report said a 12 MW AI-focused data centre being built by Saudi Arabia's DataVolt in Tashkent is due to be ready by the end of 2026.

In June, Beeline Uzbekistan agreed commercial terms to become an anchor tenant at DataVolt's TAS-1 data centre in Tashkent IT Park, VEON said; the release did not disclose capacity or financing.

Cost remains a constraint for smaller users. Shamil Ibragimov, research director at the MIT Kuo Sharper Center, told Euronews that computing power is still expensive for many Uzbek startups, some of which continue to use foreign cloud providers, and that domestic capacity is not yet sufficient at a price local firms can afford. The ministry's account says organisations can access computing power through the new sites without building their own infrastructure, but it does not include pricing.