Tashkent does not show up on most lists of the world's emerging AI capitals. That is precisely what makes the $150 million now flowing into a data center on its outskirts worth paying attention to.

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DataVolt, a Riyadh-headquartered builder of large-scale data infrastructure, has secured non-recourse project financing of up to $150 million from four international development finance institutions to build TAS-1, a 12-megawatt green data center expected to become one of Central Asia's largest AI-ready facilities when it opens in late 2026. The financing consortium, DEG, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the OPEC Fund for International Development, and Proparco, is structured as 12-year non-recourse project financing, meaning repayment rests on the project's own cash flows rather than on DataVolt's broader balance sheet.

That structuring detail matters more than it might first appear. Non-recourse financing on this scale is typically reserved for infrastructure that lenders believe will generate durable, predictable returns over a long horizon, the kind of bet usually placed on toll roads, power plants, or telecoms networks, not on a single data center in a market most Western investors would struggle to locate on a map. Four development banks choosing to structure it that way is itself a signal about how seriously the AI infrastructure buildout has started to reach beyond its usual geography.

A Government Strategy Meets a Private Build

The financing lands squarely inside Uzbekistan's own digital ambitions. The country's Digital Uzbekistan 2030 Strategy sets a target of growing the domestic market for AI products and services to $1.5 billion by the end of the decade, and TAS-1 is one of the clearest pieces of physical infrastructure built specifically to support that target. Where much of the global AI buildout has concentrated in the United States, the Gulf, and parts of East Asia, this project represents a less-told version of the same story: a government setting a digital growth target, and international capital arriving to build the physical layer underneath it.

The four lenders frame their involvement less as a one-off transaction and more as a long-term bet on the region. Holger Muent, EBRD Director of Telecommunications, Media and Technology, said the financing would mark a significant step in expanding the digital infrastructure capacity of Central Asia's most populous state, improving data management, analytics and digital services for businesses ranging from agricultural producers and processors to manufacturing companies.

That framing, anchored in agriculture and manufacturing rather than chatbots or model training, is a useful corrective to how AI infrastructure stories are usually told. The data center will not primarily serve consumer AI products. It is being built to give Uzbek businesses, many of them in industries with no obvious connection to Silicon Valley, the digital backbone to modernize how they manage data, forecast demand, and run operations.

The Skills Pipeline Built Alongside the Server Racks

What separates TAS-1 from a standard infrastructure announcement is the decision to pair the physical build with a formal talent pipeline before the facility is even finished. DataVolt has partnered with Shirin College to launch a two-year diploma program training the next generation of data center and digital infrastructure professionals in Uzbekistan, a deliberate attempt to make sure the country's own workforce, not just imported expertise, runs the facility over its operating life.

This is the part of the announcement most likely to determine whether TAS-1 becomes a genuine economic asset for Uzbekistan or simply a well-financed building. Data centers are notorious for generating modest permanent local employment relative to their capital cost. A diploma program aimed specifically at data center operations addresses that criticism directly, and it suggests DataVolt is underwriting its own long-term operating costs by training the workforce it will eventually need to hire.

Rajit Nanda, the chief executive of DataVolt, described the project in those terms. This financing marks an important milestone in the company's journey to support Uzbekistan's digital transformation and ensure the country is well placed to leverage the opportunity offered by the AI economy, he said. Nanda added that TAS-1 is not just an infrastructure investment, but a platform to develop local capabilities, foster innovation, and contribute to the creation of a digitally skilled workforce that can power Uzbekistan's long-term growth, and that DataVolt is grateful to DEG, EBRD, OPEC Fund and Proparco for sharing its vision to bring world class digital infrastructure to this thriving data center market.

Why Four Different Lenders Wanted In

The four institutions backing TAS-1 do not typically compete with each other so much as specialize by region and mandate, and their joint participation here reads as a vote of confidence repeated four separate times rather than a single endorsement. Monika Beck, a member of the Management Board at DEG, the German development finance institution, tied the project explicitly to renewable power. She said DEG's mandate is to advance sustainable development in partnership with the private sector, and noted that DataVolt is developing a new AI-ready data center with an ambition to operate largely on renewable energy sourced from the local grid in Uzbekistan, adding that DEG supports the promotion of green digital infrastructure under the Digital Uzbekistan 2030 Strategy.

Khalid Khadduri, Vice President of the Private Sector at the OPEC Fund for International Development, framed the investment around economic diversification. He said Uzbekistan's digital transformation is creating new opportunities for economic diversification, innovation and private sector growth, and that expanding modern digital infrastructure is essential to sustain this momentum, improve access to technology-enabled services and strengthen the country's competitiveness. Khadduri added that the OPEC Fund is pleased to support a project that will help accelerate this transition through long-term private investment, while also serving as the project's financial model bank.

For Proparco, the French development finance institution, the deal carries a different kind of significance: it is the firm's first data center project in Uzbekistan. Anne Gautier, Head of Energy and Telecom for Asia and Latin America at Proparco, called the investment a significant milestone for the firm in the country, reflecting its strong commitment to supporting Uzbekistan's economic transformation through sustainable digital infrastructure. She said that by combining digitalization, energy efficiency, and high environmental and social standards, the project contributes to the country's 2030 ambitions.

A Quiet Test Case for How AI Infrastructure Should Be Built

Strip away the geography and TAS-1 reads as something closer to a template than a one-off. Renewable-powered generation sourced from the local grid, a non-recourse financing structure that ties repayment to the project's own performance rather than to DataVolt's broader corporate credit, and a formal training pipeline launched in parallel with construction rather than after the fact, together amount to a different model for how AI infrastructure gets built outside the markets that usually dominate the conversation.

Much of the global discourse around AI infrastructure investment has focused on raw scale, the size of GPU clusters, the gigawatts committed to hyperscale campuses, the sovereign wealth dollars chasing compute. TAS-1 is a comparatively modest 12 megawatts, a fraction of the capacity announced for flagship projects elsewhere in the region. Its significance lies less in its size than in what four separate development finance institutions were willing to underwrite around it: a green-powered facility, financed on a structure that assumes decades of stable operation, built alongside a workforce program designed to make that operation genuinely local.

For Uzbekistan, a country of roughly 36 million people pursuing a specific, dollar-denominated digital growth target, that combination may matter more than another headline-grabbing megaproject. Late 2026, when TAS-1 is expected to come online, will be the first real test of whether that bet pays off.

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