Uzbekistan's state-owned operator Uzbektelecom has commissioned two new Tier III design-certified data centres in Bukhara and Kokand, expanding its national UzCloud platform and adding GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) capacity aimed at AI training and machine learning workloads.

The facilities went live on Tuesday, according to a statement from Uzbekistan's Ministry of Digital Technologies. Both operate as part of the UzCloud national cloud platform, which provides IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, S3 object storage and backup services.

The Bukhara and Kokand sites carry a specific AI mandate: they sit under the country's AI Cloud initiative and are equipped with dedicated GPU servers for training and running AI models, machine learning, processing large datasets, image recognition, video analytics and creating digital twins.

The locations themselves carry operational weight. Both sites sit more than 300 km from Tashkent — the furthest Uztelecom data centres from the capital — which the operator says provides a geographic tier of disaster recovery for national workloads. Each facility connects to Uztelecom's backbone network and to TAS-IX, the national internet exchange point.

For customers, the commercial proposition is straightforward: government organizations, businesses and technology companies gain access to modern computing power without building equivalent infrastructure themselves, said Umar Izbasarov, director of Uztelecom's department for advanced development and investment projects.

"Uzbekistan's digital economy is growing rapidly, and with it, the demand for reliable, world-class sovereign infrastructure is increasing," Izbasarov said in a statement. "The launch of the new data centres continues the development of the national digital infrastructure."

The emphasis on sovereign infrastructure reflects a broader pattern among state-backed operators in Central Asia, where governments are prioritizing locally hosted compute for public sector data and increasingly for AI workloads, rather than relying on foreign hyperscalers. Tier III certification gives the new facilities the concurrent maintainability that government and enterprise customers typically demand for production systems.

Uztelecom is not stopping at three sites. The ministry statement confirmed that a fifth data centre — also to be Tier III certified — will be built in the Zangiata district of the Tashkent region, with commissioning scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

The Zangiata facility will also host a technology pilot with a distinctly international flavour: Uztelekom will deploy a pilot all-photonic network (APN) based on Japan's IOWN concept, working alongside Toyota Tsusho, NTT Docomo Business and NEC. The IOWN initiative, driven by NTT and its partners, targets power-efficient photonic-based networking and computing as an alternative to conventional electronics-based infrastructure.

With two regional sites now live, a fourth in the capital region planned for 2026, and a photonics pilot attached to it, Uztelecom is positioning UzCloud as the default compute layer for Uzbekistan's public sector and a growing base of AI-hungry enterprise customers.