By Derya Soysal · October 4, 2026
Kazakhstan is hosting AI and Digital Bridge 2026, and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has declared this the Year of Artificial Intelligence and Digital. During the week of the forum, I interviewed His Excellency Sayasat Nurbek, Minister of Education of Kazakhstan. We talked about AI in classrooms, Kazakhstan’s AI strategy, international university partnerships, and the future of higher education in Central Asia.
Key takeaways
- Kazakhstan is making AI education mandatory from primary school through university.
- The « AI + X » model and the new Kazakhstan AI Research University (Qairu) will test fully AI-enabled campuses in Central Asia.
- Kazakhstan has brought about 40 international university branch campuses to the country in five years, positioning itself as an academic and technological bridge between Europe and Central Asia.
Interview
Derya Soysal: Minister, President Tokayev said this is the year of artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan, and that the country will invest in education. How will AI change education in Kazakhstan and Central Asia?
Sayasat Nurbek: Not only in our country; it is changing everything. AI is a really powerful technology. It’s even more than technology. For the very first time in the history of humankind, we’ve created something more than just a tool, just a mechanism. It has this agentic nature; it’s autonomous.
The impact of AI on every aspect of our lives is imminent. It’s so profound. You will see so many changes happening so fast. Just a few days ago, algorithms solved one of the mathematics Millennium Problems, the Navier-Stokes equation. And now the mathematical society, the scientific society, is asking, « What’s going on? »
The very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry by a non-chemist, Demis Hassabis, a genius AI founder of Google DeepMind, has also shocked the scientific community. How can a person with no prior education in this very specific field of science, but using the power of AI, receive the highest scientific awards out there?
So in Kazakhstan we have fought really hard to answer the question: how can we harness the true power of AI? Our President is very focused on AI. He believes that AI for Kazakhstan is not just a technology; it’s a great equalizer. It can bring us a new competitive advantage. One of the strategies in our national vision of AI is what we call « AI-Ready Nation. » We want to prepare Kazakhstan as much as we can for this new age: AI-fused knowledge, AI-fused technology, and AI-fused industries.
One thing I think you would agree with me on is that the world was not ready for social media. We didn’t have classroom teaching, we didn’t have proper education, and a lot of people were not introduced to social media. And what happened, happened. All these problems we have with fake news, hatred, and waves of deceit happened because we were not taught to use social media properly.
Now think about this: an even more powerful technology will be available very soon to millions, if not billions, of people, because AI is becoming cheaper every day. You’ll have fake identities, you’ll have this huge surge in cybercrime. It’s really, really difficult to imagine the consequences. So we said in Kazakhstan, and our President said, « We have to start with education. »
Derya Soysal: What does « starting with education » mean in practice?
Sayasat Nurbek: Starting from last year, every single student in Kazakhstan has to take AI courses. It’s compulsory. Not many countries do that. We were one of the first. We trained 100% of our undergraduate students last year. Every year, we select 100,000 students and teach them how to use AI properly and how to build their own agents.
Starting from the new academic year, this September, these AI courses will be mandatory for primary and secondary education. We start from schools. We start from first grade. Students are introduced to AI: what AI is and how to use it ethically and properly.
Can it really solve all our problems? No. Can it help solve many problems? Yes. Can it amplify your knowledge? Yes. Can it replace your knowledge? No.
Derya Soysal: There is a lot of debate about students relying on AI. What do you make of the PISA findings?
Sayasat Nurbek: PISA said, « We have a problem. » Students who rely on AI do really well until the exams. If you outsource your thinking to chatbots, you’re doing really well every day. You deliver lightning-fast answers; you can solve any problem. But when it comes to testing your real way of reasoning, your abstract thinking, and your logical capability, that’s it. The students who performed so well during the week fail the exams.
I know what will happen in the academic community after PISA 2026. Everybody will say, « AI is evil. Let’s ban AI. » But there was another result. The students who used AI properly, not to replace their thinking but to help them think, as tutors and mentors, for co-learning. They said, « Help me learn this, test me, talk to me, find me better ways to memorize, find me quicker ways to adapt, explain it to me, break it down. »
Derya Soysal: What is the biggest problem of the modern education system?
Sayasat Nurbek: Among all the problems, there was a key one: how do we personalize education? How do we make sure every student, including yourself, including myself, gets the best education? Because the modern education system cannot give each student the best possible education. It’s general. We’re the lucky ones, by the way. There are billions of kids out there who can’t get higher education.
The system targets the whole classroom. It targets the school. It targets the university. It doesn’t target the individual student because we can’t. We never had the technology to truly personalize education.
Imagine a prince. Imagine the Ottoman Empire, Osmanlı. You had a prince, and he had the best people in the empire teaching him: the best poets, the best historians, the best religious people, the best mathematicians, the best linguists to teach him languages, algebra, astronomy, and poetry. You know that Suleyman the Magnificent was a great poet. He had a pen name, and he would write poetry in Farsi.
The biggest limitation in the current education system is teachers. You have a limited number of them. Good schools and universities are always measured by the ratio of teachers to students. When you pick a school for your kid, you ask, « How big is your classroom? » If it’s 1 to 40, that’s bad quality, because one teacher cannot cover 40 students.
Now imagine we create so many great AI agents that have all the knowledge of humankind. They know everything about pedagogy, teaching, and psychology. They have absorbed all the books possible. The best education we ever had was 1-to-1. Imagine every single kid could be a prince. You could be a prince or princess. I could be a prince. Everybody has the best possible group of mentors, AI teachers, giving them all the best knowledge they could consume.
That is my personal dream: to create an education system where every single child will have the best possible teachers and access to the best possible education, and will be trained like a prince. Everyone has their fullest potential. They know all the languages. They’re really good at what they love. The education system brings out the best of their natural inclinations.
Is it possible? We don’t know. Now we’re experimenting. We’re partnering with the best companies: OpenAI, Coursera, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft. We’re trying to find a formula.
Derya Soysal: You mentioned the AI-SANA program. What is the idea behind it?
Sayasat Nurbek: AI-SANA is the way we want as many citizens of Kazakhstan as possible to master AI. Back in the days in Silicon Valley, there was this notion of the 10X employee: the senior software engineers who could do things 10 times faster, 10 times better than normal employees. We believe that if we use this program properly and systemically, anyone can become a 10X employee.
Anyone can become a great entrepreneur, build a new company, or simply be a good employee, go to a small enterprise, a coffee shop, any shop, and say, « Okay, I know something about AI. Let me do something with your customer relations. Let me do something with your data. » AI can provide value anywhere, anytime. That’s the whole idea.
Derya Soysal: Minister, the government has just opened a university dedicated to artificial intelligence. How can this investment make Kazakhstan a leader in AI education in Central Asia and in the wider Eurasian region?
Sayasat Nurbek: When we started AI-SANA, we implemented what we call the AI + X model. Students learn their academic major, whether journalism, chemistry, IT, arts, or agriculture, plus we give them a heavy, in-depth AI component so they can fuse AI with their studies. They become AI architects, AI chemists, like Demis Hassabis. There’s a great documentary on Netflix about his life journey, The Thinking Game. I really recommend it.
Then we realized we needed a different kind of university, because AI is changing higher education as well. They call them AI-enabled universities, and there’s a huge experiment happening in the world: Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the Emirates, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Tsinghua, Northeastern in Boston, Carnegie Mellon. Some are trying to go into full AI mode, and it’s really interesting to see how this evolves.
Basically, you have a campus run by an algorithm, and you get truly personalized student journey trajectories. When I went to university, it was five years, not four, before we joined the Bologna Process. I read some books, but I didn’t get the full experience of the campus. Imagine a smart campus that says: « Sayasat, you’re studying international public law. There’s a public lecture the day after tomorrow which we think would be interesting to you. We want you to register. It’s half of the credit you need. Your book has to be returned; the one-month period has expired. So take the book to the library, go to the lecture, and get your credit. »
It’s much more complex than that, but the idea is that you’re co-living with AI. It’s called Human-Centered AI. Qairu, the Kazakhstan AI Research University, will be the first university in Central Asia that is fully AI-enabled. We’ll test the AI + X model, and then scale the experience to universities across Kazakhstan. We believe we’re doing something nobody has done before.
And education systems are very conservative. We declare, « We want to build a future-proof education system, » but in reality, we resist change.
Derya Soysal: Is faculty ready for this change?
Sayasat Nurbek: OpenAI has launched a project called OpenAI for Countries in eight countries, and Kazakhstan is among the first eight in the world. One thing we’ve learned: the bottleneck is not the students; it’s the faculty. They resist the change. They resist AI. So instead of them resisting, we said, « Let us train them. » We started training 68,000 faculty members, 100% of them in higher education. Each received a free license of GPT Education, a special edition of GPT that helps teachers become better teachers and better researchers.
It’s a very bold experiment. We’ll report by the end of this year.
Derya Soysal: You said the education system is very conservative, but when I come to Kazakhstan, I see a huge transformation. We met in Brussels, and you were in Berlin. What role can European universities play in Kazakhstan?
Sayasat Nurbek: Five years ago we launched a strategy, and our President said we should open up to the world and bring as many good universities to Kazakhstan as possible. I traveled a lot, and I’m traveling again. We brought about 40 really great universities to Kazakhstan, and they opened branch campuses. Now we are one of the largest academic hubs in this region. We are officially in the top 14 academic destinations in the world. You can see Colorado School of Mines, Cardiff, University of Arizona, Arizona State, Heriot-Watt, Coventry, University of Minnesota, KAIST, and the New York Film Academy.
My message in Germany, France, and the UK was simple: if you can’t get enough students from our part of the world, come to the middle of the action. Extend your services in the region through Kazakhstan, with the full support of the Kazakh government. In five years, we’ve established 40 partnerships and attracted almost 41,000 international students. That’s our historic record.
Europe is a big part of this strategy. We have very active British university participation. We have the University of Lorraine from France. We are now dealing with the Institute of Nuclear Physics, INP, from Grenoble, a leading French institution in nuclear engineering. Kazakhstan has three nuclear power plants in the pipeline, so we need to train a lot of nuclear engineers.
We have Hochschule Anhalt, the first German university opening a branch campus in Almaty. There’s a consortium of German universities in the west of Kazakhstan where we train people for green hydrogen production, and another in the east with a big research center in metallurgy, critical minerals, and rare earths. There’s a Polish university, Bydgoszcz, in east Kazakhstan, and a couple of Hungarian universities.
Derya Soysal: You mentioned the visit of the King of Belgium. Why should Belgian universities invest in Kazakhstan?
Sayasat Nurbek: For all the reasons I mentioned. Next week, His Majesty the King of Belgium is traveling on a state visit to Kazakhstan, and we’re going to have a large number of Belgian universities. We’re setting up a math research center, an AI research center in mathematics and applied mathematics. We have Ghent University. We have a great Department of Mathematics at KU Leuven. We are also opening a rare earth metal research facility in Oskemen, in east Kazakhstan.
By the way, we are opening a United Nations University in Almaty next year.
Derya Soysal: What do these academic partnerships bring beyond education?
Sayasat Nurbek: Let me give you one example. When Cardiff opened its branch campus in Astana last year, AstraZeneca said, « Wow, now we’re in the region, » and relocated their regional office from Moscow to Astana. They said, « We’ve never done any clinical research in the region, but now, having Cardiff, having that research potential and research ethics, we know, we trust, we’re going to open up funding. » The first million-euro funding went to a university in North Kazakhstan, in partnership with AstraZeneca, because we have the University of Arizona and a great biomedical school at Nazarbayev University.
So academic partnerships are bridges. They bring investments, partnerships, and industry links.
Derya Soysal: And why should Europe look closer to Central Asia?
Sayasat Nurbek: Europe needs Kazakhstan. Europe needs Central Asia for many reasons: for the Middle Corridor, for transport and transit potential, for critical minerals. Kazakhstan is number three in critical mineral deposits, after China and Brazil. For the nuclear program: nuclear is back on the menu. Europe needs access to reliable supply chains of fuel and uranium, and Kazakhstan is the number one uranium producer in the world. 43% of all uranium is produced in Kazakhstan.
All the technological advancements and engineering potential of European countries, combined with access to the critical minerals and natural resources of Kazakhstan, are a natural fit.
There’s another reason: demographics. This region produces more babies than anywhere in the world after Africa. Let me give you some shocking figures. Japan: 122 million population last year, 671,000 babies. South Korea: 52 million, 254,000 babies. Uzbekistan: 33-plus, 44-plus million, a million babies. Kazakhstan: 20 million, 646,000 babies. So there’s a boom. Southeast Asia is not the engine of human growth anymore. It’s this region of Greater Eurasia where more babies are being born, with quite good literacy and quite good education.
So any venture capital, any pharmaceutical company, any food company, agriculture company, any education company should have a much closer look at this region, which is rich both in natural resources and human resources.
Derya Soysal: So we can say that the future is Central Asia and the future is Kazakhstan?
Sayasat Nurbek: It will be one of the centers of growth: financial growth, economic growth, technological growth, and human growth. That is for sure.
Derya Soysal: To conclude, why should Belgium look at Kazakhstan now?
Sayasat Nurbek: For its demographics, its access to critical minerals, its vast territory with huge agricultural potential, and its natural resources and fuel, including alternatives and nuclear. All the major resources that any high-tech industry needs in the next 10 to 15 years, including computing power, are here.
The biggest project Kazakhstan will run is called Data Centers Valley in Ekibastuz, close to Astana. It has some of the cheapest energy available in the region, around two to two and a half cents per kilowatt. NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, will be traveling to Astana on 23 October, because NVIDIA and all these large tech companies are looking for cold, energy-cheap locations for their data centers: more compute, more compute, and more compute.
So for all the traditional reasons and all these new high-tech, data, AI, and digital reasons, Kazakhstan and the whole region of Central Asia are very unique locations.
Derya Soysal: Thank you very much, Sayasat Nurbek. Let’s make Kazakhstan closer to the EU, and Kazakhstan closer to Belgium.
Sayasat Nurbek: Yes, of course. I think His Majesty’s visit will open a new chapter in bilateral relations, but also in European and Central Asian relations.
Check before publishing:
- Birth figures: the Minister first says about half a million babies are born annually in Kazakhstan, then gives 646,000. His India and Pakistan figures are unclear, so I left them out.
- Hungarian universities: the transcript line « Debrecen, French » looks like a transcription error, so I kept this general.
- Navier-Stokes claim: this is his statement, so it stays attributed to him.
- Questions: I added a few of my own as bridging questions (marked as Derya Soysal) where the transcript had only his continuous answers. Please check they match what you actually asked.
I can turn this into a Word document if you’d like.
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Interview with H.E. Sayasat Nurbek: « Every Kid Could Be a Prince »
Kazakhstan’s Minister of Education on compulsory AI education, Central Asia’s first fully AI-enabled university, and why Europe, and Belgium in particular, should look closer at the region.
By Derya Soysal · October 4, 2026
Kazakhstan is hosting AI and Digital Bridge 2026, and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has declared this the Year of Artificial Intelligence and Digital. During the week of the forum, I interviewed His Excellency Sayasat Nurbek, Minister of Education of Kazakhstan. We talked about AI in classrooms, Kazakhstan’s AI strategy, international university partnerships, and the future of higher education in Central Asia.
Key takeaways
- Kazakhstan is making AI education mandatory from primary school through university.
- The « AI + X » model and the new Kazakhstan AI Research University (Qairu) will test fully AI-enabled campuses in Central Asia.
- Kazakhstan has brought about 40 international university branch campuses to the country in five years, positioning itself as an academic and technological bridge between Europe and Central Asia.
Interview
Derya Soysal: Minister, President Tokayev said this is the year of artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan, and that the country will invest in education. How will artificial intelligence change education in Kazakhstan and Central Asia?
Sayasat Nurbek: Not only in our country; it is changing everything. AI is a really powerful technology. It’s even more than technology. For the very first time in the history of humankind, we’ve created something more than just a tool, just a mechanism. It has this agentic nature; it’s autonomous.
The impact of AI on every aspect of our lives is imminent. It’s so profound. You will see so many changes happening so fast. Just a few days ago, algorithms solved one of the mathematics Millennium Problems, the Navier-Stokes equation. And now the mathematical society, the scientific society, is asking, « What’s going on? »
The very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry by a non-chemist, Demis Hassabis, a genius AI founder of Google DeepMind, has also shocked the scientific community. How can a person with no prior education in this very specific field of science, but using the power of AI, receive the highest scientific awards out there?
So in Kazakhstan we have fought really hard to answer the question: how can we harness the true power of AI? Our President is very focused on AI. He believes that AI for Kazakhstan is not just a technology; it’s a great equalizer. It can bring us a new competitive advantage. One of the strategies in our national vision of AI is what we call « AI-Ready Nation. » We want to prepare Kazakhstan as much as we can for this new age: AI-fused knowledge, AI-fused technology, and AI-fused industries.
One thing I think you would agree with me on is that the world was not ready for social media. We didn’t have classroom teaching, we didn’t have proper education, and a lot of people were not introduced to social media. And what happened, happened. All these problems we have with fake news, hatred, and waves of deceit happened because we were not taught to use social media properly.
Now think about this: an even more powerful technology will be available very soon to millions, if not billions, of people, because AI is becoming cheaper every day. You’ll have fake identities, you’ll have this huge surge in cybercrime. It’s really, really difficult to imagine the consequences. So we said in Kazakhstan, and our President said, « We have to start with education. »
Starting from last year, every single student in Kazakhstan has to take AI courses. It’s compulsory. Not many countries do that. We were one of the first. We trained 100% of our undergraduate students last year. Every year, we select 100,000 students and teach them how to use AI properly and how to build their own agents. Starting from the new academic year, this September, these AI courses will be mandatory for primary and secondary education. We start from first grade. Students are introduced to AI: what AI is and how to use it ethically and properly.
Can it really solve all our problems? No. Can it help solve many problems? Yes. Can it amplify your knowledge? Yes. Can it replace your knowledge? No.
One of the most debated results in the academic world at the moment comes from PISA. PISA said, « We have a problem. » Students who rely on AI do really well until the exams. If you outsource your thinking to chatbots, you deliver lightning-fast answers every day. But when it comes to testing your real reasoning, your abstract thinking, and your logical capability, that’s it. The students who performed so well during the week fail the exams.
I know what will happen in the academic community after PISA 2026. Everybody will say, « AI is evil. Let’s ban AI. » But there was another result. The students who used AI properly, not to replace their thinking but to help them think, as tutors and mentors, for co-learning. They said, « Help me learn this, test me, talk to me, find me better ways to memorize, explain it to me, break it down. »
Derya Soysal: What is the biggest problem of the modern education system?
Sayasat Nurbek: Among all the problems, there was a key one: how do we personalize education? How do we make sure every student, including yourself, including myself, gets the best education? Because the modern education system cannot give each student the best possible education. It’s general. We’re the lucky ones, by the way. There are billions of kids out there who can’t get higher education.
The system targets the whole classroom, the school, the university. It doesn’t target the individual student because we can’t. We never had the technology to truly personalize education.
Imagine a prince. Imagine the Ottoman Empire, Osmanlı. You had a prince, and he had the best people in the empire teaching him: the best poets, the best historians, the best religious people, the best mathematicians, the best linguists to teach him languages, algebra, astronomy, and poetry. You know that Suleyman the Magnificent was a great poet. He had a pen name, and he would write poetry in Farsi.
The biggest limitation in the current education system is teachers. Good schools and universities are always measured by the ratio of teachers to students. If it’s 1 to 40, that’s bad quality, because one teacher cannot cover 40 students.
Now imagine we create so many great AI agents that have all the knowledge of humankind. They know everything about pedagogy, teaching, and psychology. They have absorbed all the books possible. The best education we ever had was 1-to-1. Imagine every single kid could be a prince. You could be a prince or princess. I could be a prince. Everybody has the best possible group of mentors, AI teachers, giving them all the best knowledge they could consume.
That is my personal dream: to create an education system where every single child will have the best possible teachers and access to the best possible education, and will be trained like a prince. Is it possible? We don’t know. Now we’re experimenting. We’re partnering with the best companies: OpenAI, Coursera, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft. We’re trying to find a formula.
The AI-SANA program is the way we want as many citizens of Kazakhstan as possible to master AI. Back in the days in Silicon Valley, there was this notion of the 10X employee, the senior engineer who could do things 10 times faster than normal employees. We believe that if we use this program properly and systemically, anyone can become a 10X employee. Anyone can become a great entrepreneur, or simply go to a small enterprise, a coffee shop, any shop, and say, « I know something about AI. Let me do something with your customer relations. Let me do something with your data. » AI can provide value anywhere, anytime. That’s the whole idea.
Derya Soysal: Dear Minister, do you know that the government just opened a university dedicated to artificial intelligence? How can this investment help Kazakhstan become a leader in AI education in Central Asia, but also in the Eurasian region, because you are also going to Tokyo?
Sayasat Nurbek: When we started AI-SANA, we implemented what we call the AI + X model. Students learn their academic major, whether journalism, chemistry, IT, arts, or agriculture, plus we give them a heavy, in-depth AI component so they can fuse AI with their studies. They become AI architects, AI chemists, like Demis Hassabis. There’s a great documentary on Netflix about his life journey, The Thinking Game. I really recommend it.
Then we realized we needed a different kind of university, because AI is changing higher education as well. They call them AI-enabled universities, and there’s a huge experiment happening in the world: Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the Emirates, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Tsinghua, Northeastern in Boston, Carnegie Mellon. Some are trying to go into full AI mode, and it’s really interesting to see how this evolves.
Basically, you have a campus run by an algorithm, and you get truly personalized student journey trajectories. When I went to university, it was five years, not four, before we joined the Bologna Process. I read some books, but I didn’t get the full experience of the campus. Imagine a smart campus that says: « Sayasat, you’re studying international public law. There’s a public lecture the day after tomorrow which we think would be interesting to you. We want you to register. It’s half of the credit you need. Your book has to be returned; the one-month period has expired. So take the book to the library, go to the lecture, and get your credit. »
It’s much more complex than that, but the idea is that you’re co-living with AI. It’s called Human-Centered AI. Qairu, the Kazakhstan AI Research University, will be the first university in Central Asia that is fully AI-enabled. We’ll test the AI + X model, and then scale the experience to universities across Kazakhstan. We believe we’re doing something nobody has done before.
And education systems are very conservative. We declare, « We want to build a future-proof education system, » but in reality, we resist change. OpenAI has launched a project called OpenAI for Countries in eight countries, and Kazakhstan is among the first eight in the world. One thing we’ve learned: the bottleneck is not the students; it’s the faculty. They resist AI. So instead of them resisting, we said, « Let us train them. » We started training 68,000 faculty members, 100% of them in higher education. Each received a free license of GPT Education, a special edition of GPT that helps teachers become better teachers and better researchers. It’s a very bold experiment. We’ll report by the end of this year.
Derya Soysal: You said that the educational system is very conservative, but when I come to Kazakhstan, I see a huge transformation. We met in Brussels, and you were in Berlin. What role can European universities play in Kazakhstan, and in the transformation of the education system here?
Sayasat Nurbek: Five years ago we launched a strategy, and our President said we should open up to the world and bring as many good universities to Kazakhstan as possible. I traveled a lot, and I’m traveling again. We brought about 40 really great universities to Kazakhstan, and they opened branch campuses. Now we are one of the largest academic hubs in this region. We are officially in the top 14 academic destinations in the world. You can see Colorado School of Mines, Cardiff, University of Arizona, Arizona State, Heriot-Watt, Coventry, University of Minnesota, KAIST, and the New York Film Academy.
My message in Germany, France, and the UK was simple: if you can’t get enough students from our part of the world, come to the middle of the action. Extend your services in the region through Kazakhstan, with the full support of the Kazakh government. In five years, we’ve established 40 partnerships and attracted almost 41,000 international students. That’s our historic record.
Europe is a big part of this strategy. We have very active British university participation. We have the University of Lorraine from France. We are now dealing with the Institute of Nuclear Physics, INP, from Grenoble, a leading French institution in nuclear engineering. Kazakhstan has three nuclear power plants in the pipeline, so we need to train a lot of nuclear engineers. We have Hochschule Anhalt, the first German university opening a branch campus in Almaty. There’s a consortium of German universities in the west of Kazakhstan where we train people for green hydrogen production, and another in the east with a big research center in metallurgy, critical minerals, and rare earths. There’s a Polish university, Bydgoszcz, in east Kazakhstan, and a couple of Hungarian universities.
Next week, His Majesty the King of Belgium is traveling on a state visit to Kazakhstan, and we’re going to have a large number of Belgian universities. We’re setting up a math research center, an AI research center in mathematics and applied mathematics. We have Ghent University. We have a great Department of Mathematics at KU Leuven. We are also opening a rare earth metal research facility in Oskemen, in east Kazakhstan.
We want to partner with the European Union and with European countries. Europe needs Kazakhstan, for the Middle Corridor, for transit potential, for critical minerals. Kazakhstan is number three in critical mineral deposits, after China and Brazil. Nuclear is back on the menu. Europe needs reliable supply chains of fuel and uranium, and Kazakhstan is the number one uranium producer in the world: 43% of all uranium is produced here.
Through these academic partnerships, we’re building industry links. When Cardiff opened its branch campus in Astana last year, AstraZeneca said, « Wow, now we’re in the region, » and relocated their regional office from Moscow to Astana. They said, « We’ve never done any clinical research in the region, but now, having Cardiff, having that research potential and research ethics, we know, we trust, we’re going to open up funding. » The first million-euro funding went to a university in North Kazakhstan, in partnership with AstraZeneca, because we have the University of Arizona and a great biomedical school at Nazarbayev University. So academic partnerships are bridges. They bring investments, partnerships, and industry links.
Europe should also look closer at the region for another reason: demographics. This region produces more babies than anywhere in the world after Africa. Japan: 122 million population last year, 671,000 babies. South Korea: 52 million, 254,000 babies. Uzbekistan: 33-plus, 44-plus million, a million babies. Kazakhstan: 20 million, 646,000 babies. Southeast Asia is not the engine of human growth anymore. It’s this region of Greater Eurasia, with quite good literacy and quite good education. Any venture capital, pharmaceutical, food, agriculture, or education company should have a much closer look at this region, which is rich both in natural and human resources.
Derya Soysal: So we can say that the future is Central Asia and the future is Kazakhstan?
Sayasat Nurbek: It will be one of the centers of growth: financial growth, economic growth, technological growth, and human growth. That is for sure.
Derya Soysal: To conclude, you were mentioning the visit of the King of Belgium. He will come to Astana. Why should Belgian universities invest here?
Sayasat Nurbek: For all the reasons I mentioned. And, by the way, we are opening a United Nations University in Almaty next year. For its demographics, its access to critical minerals, its vast territory with huge agricultural potential, and its natural resources and fuel, including alternatives and nuclear, all the major resources that any high-tech industry needs in the next 10 to 15 years, including computing power, are here.
The biggest project Kazakhstan will run is called Data Centers Valley in Ekibastuz, close to Astana. It has some of the cheapest energy available in the region, around two to two and a half cents per kilowatt. NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, will be traveling to Astana on 23 October, because NVIDIA and all these large tech companies are looking for cold, energy-cheap locations for their data centers: more compute, more compute, and more compute. So for all the traditional reasons and all these new high-tech, data, AI, and digital reasons, Kazakhstan and the whole region of Central Asia are very unique locations.
Derya Soysal: Thank you very much, Sayasat Nurbek. Let’s make Kazakhstan closer to the EU, but also Kazakhstan closer to Belgium.
Sayasat Nurbek: Yes, of course. I think His Majesty’s visit will open a new chapter in bilateral relations, but also in European and Central Asian relations.
À vérifier avant publication :
- Chiffres de naissances : le ministre dit d’abord environ 500 000 naissances par an au Kazakhstan, puis 646 000. Ses chiffres pour l’Inde et le Pakistan sont peu clairs, je les ai donc retirés.
- Universités hongroises : « Debrecen, French » ressemble à une erreur de transcription, donc je suis resté général.
- Navier-Stokes : c’est une affirmation du ministre, elle reste attribuée à lui.
Je peux aussi en faire un document Word si vous le souhaitez.
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You said:
j’ai jamais demané le biggest problem fais ensuite une analyse résumée
Copilot said:
Reasoned for 1s
Voici l’article sans la question « biggest problem ». Elle était posée par le ministre lui-même, pas par vous. Son passage sur la personnalisation de l’éducation est donc maintenant intégré à sa première réponse, et j’ai ajouté une analyse résumée à la fin.
Interview with H.E. Sayasat Nurbek: « Every Kid Could Be a Prince »
Kazakhstan’s Minister of Education on compulsory AI education, Central Asia’s first fully AI-enabled university, and why Europe, and Belgium in particular, should look closer at the region.
By Derya Soysal · October 4, 2026
Kazakhstan is hosting AI and Digital Bridge 2026, and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has declared this the Year of Artificial Intelligence and Digital. During the week of the forum, I interviewed His Excellency Sayasat Nurbek, Minister of Education of Kazakhstan. We talked about AI in classrooms, Kazakhstan’s AI strategy, international university partnerships, and the future of higher education in Central Asia.
Key takeaways
- Kazakhstan is making AI education mandatory from primary school through university.
- The « AI + X » model and the new Kazakhstan AI Research University (Qairu) will test fully AI-enabled campuses in Central Asia.
- Kazakhstan has brought about 40 international university branch campuses to the country in five years, positioning itself as an academic and technological bridge between Europe and Central Asia.
Interview
Derya Soysal: Minister, President Tokayev said this is the year of artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan, and that the country will invest in education. How will artificial intelligence change education in Kazakhstan and Central Asia?
Sayasat Nurbek: Not only in our country; it is changing everything. AI is a really powerful technology. It’s even more than technology. For the very first time in the history of humankind, we’ve created something more than just a tool, just a mechanism. It has this agentic nature; it’s autonomous.
The impact of AI on every aspect of our lives is imminent. It’s so profound. You will see so many changes happening so fast. Just a few days ago, algorithms solved one of the mathematics Millennium Problems, the Navier-Stokes equation. And now the mathematical society, the scientific society, is asking, « What’s going on? »
The very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry by a non-chemist, Demis Hassabis, a genius AI founder of Google DeepMind, has also shocked the scientific community. How can a person with no prior education in this very specific field of science, but using the power of AI, receive the highest scientific awards out there?
So in Kazakhstan we have fought really hard to answer the question: how can we harness the true power of AI? Our President is very focused on AI. He believes that AI for Kazakhstan is not just a technology; it’s a great equalizer. It can bring us a new competitive advantage. One of the strategies in our national vision of AI is what we call « AI-Ready Nation. » We want to prepare Kazakhstan as much as we can for this new age: AI-fused knowledge, AI-fused technology, and AI-fused industries.
One thing I think you would agree with me on is that the world was not ready for social media. We didn’t have classroom teaching, we didn’t have proper education, and a lot of people were not introduced to social media. And what happened, happened. All these problems we have with fake news, hatred, and waves of deceit happened because we were not taught to use social media properly.
Now think about this: an even more powerful technology will be available very soon to millions, if not billions, of people, because AI is becoming cheaper every day. You’ll have fake identities, you’ll have this huge surge in cybercrime. It’s really, really difficult to imagine the consequences. So we said in Kazakhstan, and our President said, « We have to start with education. »
Starting from last year, every single student in Kazakhstan has to take AI courses. It’s compulsory. Not many countries do that. We were one of the first. We trained 100% of our undergraduate students last year. Every year, we select 100,000 students and teach them how to use AI properly and how to build their own agents. Starting from the new academic year, this September, these AI courses will be mandatory for primary and secondary education. We start from first grade. Students are introduced to AI: what AI is and how to use it ethically and properly.
Can it really solve all our problems? No. Can it help solve many problems? Yes. Can it amplify your knowledge? Yes. Can it replace your knowledge? No.
One of the most debated results in the academic world at the moment comes from PISA. PISA said, « We have a problem. » Students who rely on AI do really well until the exams. If you outsource your thinking to chatbots, you deliver lightning-fast answers every day. But when it comes to testing your real reasoning, your abstract thinking, and your logical capability, that’s it. The students who performed so well during the week fail the exams.
I know what will happen in the academic community after PISA 2026. Everybody will say, « AI is evil. Let’s ban AI. » But there was another result. The students who used AI properly, not to replace their thinking but to help them think, as tutors and mentors, for co-learning. They said, « Help me learn this, test me, talk to me, find me better ways to memorize, explain it to me, break it down. »
Among all the problems of modern education, there was a key one: how do we personalize education? How do we make sure every student, including yourself, including myself, gets the best education? Because the modern education system cannot give each student the best possible education. It’s general. We’re the lucky ones, by the way. There are billions of kids out there who can’t get higher education.
The system targets the whole classroom, the school, the university. It doesn’t target the individual student because we can’t. We never had the technology to truly personalize education.
Imagine a prince. Imagine the Ottoman Empire, Osmanlı. You had a prince, and he had the best people in the empire teaching him: the best poets, the best historians, the best religious people, the best mathematicians, the best linguists to teach him languages, algebra, astronomy, and poetry. You know that Suleyman the Magnificent was a great poet. He had a pen name, and he would write poetry in Farsi.
The biggest limitation in the current education system is teachers. Good schools and universities are always measured by the ratio of teachers to students. If it’s 1 to 40, that’s bad quality, because one teacher cannot cover 40 students.
Now imagine we create so many great AI agents that have all the knowledge of humankind. They know everything about pedagogy, teaching, and psychology. They have absorbed all the books possible. The best education we ever had was 1-to-1. Imagine every single kid could be a prince. You could be a prince or princess. I could be a prince. Everybody has the best possible group of mentors, AI teachers, giving them all the best knowledge they could consume.
That is my personal dream: to create an education system where every single child will have the best possible teachers and access to the best possible education, and will be trained like a prince. Is it possible? We don’t know. Now we’re experimenting. We’re partnering with the best companies: OpenAI, Coursera, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft. We’re trying to find a formula.
The AI-SANA program is the way we want as many citizens of Kazakhstan as possible to master AI. Back in the days in Silicon Valley, there was this notion of the 10X employee, the senior engineer who could do things 10 times faster than normal employees. We believe that if we use this program properly and systemically, anyone can become a 10X employee. Anyone can become a great entrepreneur, or simply go to a small enterprise, a coffee shop, any shop, and say, « I know something about AI. Let me do something with your customer relations. Let me do something with your data. » AI can provide value anywhere, anytime. That’s the whole idea.
Derya Soysal: Dear Minister, do you know that the government just opened a university dedicated to artificial intelligence? How can this investment help Kazakhstan become a leader in AI education in Central Asia, but also in the Eurasian region, because you are also going to Tokyo?
Sayasat Nurbek: When we started AI-SANA, we implemented what we call the AI + X model. Students learn their academic major, whether journalism, chemistry, IT, arts, or agriculture, plus we give them a heavy, in-depth AI component so they can fuse AI with their studies. They become AI architects, AI chemists, like Demis Hassabis. There’s a great documentary on Netflix about his life journey, The Thinking Game. I really recommend it.
Then we realized we needed a different kind of university, because AI is changing higher education as well. They call them AI-enabled universities, and there’s a huge experiment happening in the world: Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the Emirates, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Tsinghua, Northeastern in Boston, Carnegie Mellon. Some are trying to go into full AI mode, and it’s really interesting to see how this evolves.
Basically, you have a campus run by an algorithm, and you get truly personalized student journey trajectories. When I went to university, it was five years, not four, before we joined the Bologna Process. I read some books, but I didn’t get the full experience of the campus. Imagine a smart campus that says: « Sayasat, you’re studying international public law. There’s a public lecture the day after tomorrow which we think would be interesting to you. We want you to register. It’s half of the credit you need. Your book has to be returned; the one-month period has expired. So take the book to the library, go to the lecture, and get your credit. »
It’s much more complex than that, but the idea is that you’re co-living with AI. It’s called Human-Centered AI. Qairu, the Kazakhstan AI Research University, will be the first university in Central Asia that is fully AI-enabled. We’ll test the AI + X model, and then scale the experience to universities across Kazakhstan. We believe we’re doing something nobody has done before.
And education systems are very conservative. We declare, « We want to build a future-proof education system, » but in reality, we resist change. OpenAI has launched a project called OpenAI for Countries in eight countries, and Kazakhstan is among the first eight in the world. One thing we’ve learned: the bottleneck is not the students; it’s the faculty. They resist AI. So instead of them resisting, we said, « Let us train them. » We started training 68,000 faculty members, 100% of them in higher education. Each received a free license of GPT Education, a special edition of GPT that helps teachers become better teachers and better researchers. It’s a very bold experiment. We’ll report by the end of this year.
Derya Soysal: You said that the educational system is very conservative, but when I come to Kazakhstan, I see a huge transformation. We met in Brussels, and you were in Berlin. What role can European universities play in Kazakhstan, and in the transformation of the education system here?
Sayasat Nurbek: Five years ago we launched a strategy, and our President said we should open up to the world and bring as many good universities to Kazakhstan as possible. I traveled a lot, and I’m traveling again. We brought about 40 really great universities to Kazakhstan, and they opened branch campuses. Now we are one of the largest academic hubs in this region. We are officially in the top 14 academic destinations in the world. You can see Colorado School of Mines, Cardiff, University of Arizona, Arizona State, Heriot-Watt, Coventry, University of Minnesota, KAIST, and the New York Film Academy.
My message in Germany, France, and the UK was simple: if you can’t get enough students from our part of the world, come to the middle of the action. Extend your services in the region through Kazakhstan, with the full support of the Kazakh government. In five years, we’ve established 40 partnerships and attracted almost 41,000 international students. That’s our historic record.
Europe is a big part of this strategy. We have very active British university participation. We have the University of Lorraine from France. We are now dealing with the Institute of Nuclear Physics, INP, from Grenoble, a leading French institution in nuclear engineering. Kazakhstan has three nuclear power plants in the pipeline, so we need to train a lot of nuclear engineers. We have Hochschule Anhalt, the first German university opening a branch campus in Almaty. There’s a consortium of German universities in the west of Kazakhstan where we train people for green hydrogen production, and another in the east with a big research center in metallurgy, critical minerals, and rare earths. There’s a Polish university, Bydgoszcz, in east Kazakhstan, and a couple of Hungarian universities.
Next week, His Majesty the King of Belgium is traveling on a state visit to Kazakhstan, and we’re going to have a large number of Belgian universities. We’re setting up a math research center, an AI research center in mathematics and applied mathematics. We have Ghent University. We have a great Department of Mathematics at KU Leuven. We are also opening a rare earth metal research facility in Oskemen, in east Kazakhstan.
We want to partner with the European Union and with European countries. Europe needs Kazakhstan, for the Middle Corridor, for transit potential, for critical minerals. Kazakhstan is number three in critical mineral deposits, after China and Brazil. Nuclear is back on the menu. Europe needs reliable supply chains of fuel and uranium, and Kazakhstan is the number one uranium producer in the world: 43% of all uranium is produced here.
Through these academic partnerships, we’re building industry links. When Cardiff opened its branch campus in Astana last year, AstraZeneca said, « Wow, now we’re in the region, » and relocated their regional office from Moscow to Astana. They said, « We’ve never done any clinical research in the region, but now, having Cardiff, having that research potential and research ethics, we know, we trust, we’re going to open up funding. » The first million-euro funding went to a university in North Kazakhstan, in partnership with AstraZeneca, because we have the University of Arizona and a great biomedical school at Nazarbayev University. So academic partnerships are bridges. They bring investments, partnerships, and industry links.
Europe should also look closer at the region for another reason: demographics. This region produces more babies than anywhere in the world after Africa. Japan: 122 million population last year, 671,000 babies. South Korea: 52 million, 254,000 babies. Uzbekistan: 33-plus, 44-plus million, a million babies. Kazakhstan: 20 million, 646,000 babies. Southeast Asia is not the engine of human growth anymore. It’s this region of Greater Eurasia, with quite good literacy and quite good education. Any venture capital, pharmaceutical, food, agriculture, or education company should have a much closer look at this region, which is rich both in natural and human resources.
Derya Soysal: So we can say that the future is Central Asia and the future is Kazakhstan?
Sayasat Nurbek: It will be one of the centers of growth: financial growth, economic growth, technological growth, and human growth. That is for sure.
Derya Soysal: To conclude, you were mentioning the visit of the King of Belgium. He will come to Astana. Why should Belgian universities invest here?
Sayasat Nurbek: For all the reasons I mentioned. And, by the way, we are opening a United Nations University in Almaty next year. For its demographics, its access to critical minerals, its vast territory with huge agricultural potential, and its natural resources and fuel, including alternatives and nuclear, all the major resources that any high-tech industry needs in the next 10 to 15 years, including computing power, are here.
The biggest project Kazakhstan will run is called Data Centers Valley in Ekibastuz, close to Astana. It has some of the cheapest energy available in the region, around two to two and a half cents per kilowatt. NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, will be traveling to Astana on 23 October, because NVIDIA and all these large tech companies are looking for cold, energy-cheap locations for their data centers: more compute, more compute, and more compute. So for all the traditional reasons and all these new high-tech, data, AI, and digital reasons, Kazakhstan and the whole region of Central Asia are very unique locations.
Derya Soysal: Thank you very much, Sayasat Nurbek. Let’s make Kazakhstan closer to the EU, but also Kazakhstan closer to Belgium.
Sayasat Nurbek: Yes, of course. I think His Majesty’s visit will open a new chapter in bilateral relations, but also in European and Central Asian relations.
Conclusion
My conversation with Minister Sayasat Nurbek left me with one clear impression: Kazakhstan does not want to watch the AI era from the sidelines. By making AI courses compulsory from first grade, training all 68,000 of its higher-education faculty members, and preparing Qairu, the country’s first fully AI-enabled university, it is betting that education is where the AI race will be won or lost.
The Minister was candid about the limits. AI can amplify knowledge but cannot replace it. His vision of an education system where every child is trained « like a prince » is, in his own words, still an experiment: « Is it possible? We don’t know. » The results of the faculty training programme, due by the end of the year, will be an early test.
The interview also showed that this strategy looks outward. About 40 foreign branch campuses and almost 41,000 international students in five years show that Kazakhstan sees universities as bridges to investment, industry and diplomacy. For Europe, the offer is clear: critical minerals, uranium and cheap energy for data centers, in exchange for technology, research and expertise.
For Belgium, the timing matters. With the King’s state visit next week and Belgian universities such as Ghent University and KU Leuven set to take part, the Minister believes a new chapter is opening. As I said at the end of our conversation, let’s make Kazakhstan closer to the EU, and closer to Belgium.
