Masdar broke ground on its first Kazakh wind farm on Jun 29, a 1 GW project with a $1.4 billion price tag and a 600 MWh battery bolted on.
The site sits in Kazakhstan’s Zhambyl region, co-developed with Alpha Dhabi subsidiary W Solar, Qazaq Green Power (a Samruk-Kazyna Fund company), and the Kazakhstan Investment Development Fund. The build adds more than 400 km of new overhead transmission alongside the turbines and will power roughly 880,000 southern Kazakh homes once operational. In parallel, Masdar signed a roadmap agreement with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of AI and Digital Development for the country’s first Round-the-Clock clean energy project, with a proposed initial phase of up to 200 MW of baseload for data centres and AI infrastructure.
Why it matters
Zhambyl is Masdar’s first renewable energy development in Kazakhstan, and Masdar describes it as one of the largest integrated wind and battery storage projects in Central Asia. The RTC roadmap is a separate project, signed the same day with the AI ministry. My read is that data-centre baseload is starting to shape where the next class of gigascale clean power gets built.
What it means for MENA
Alpha Dhabi’s chief executive framed the deal as UAE capital and expertise going to markets where the energy transition is accelerating. We read it the same way: MENA capital continuing its shift from importer of wind technology to sponsor of large overseas wind projects.
